A new publication, “Under Pressure: Essays on Urban Housing” (Routledge, 2021), edited by Hina Jamelle, senior lecturer and director of urban housing in the Department of Architecture in the Weitzman School of Design, gathers and contextualizes recent conversations on urban housing through a design lens. The book traces its origins to a conference organized by Jamelle in 2016 at the Weitzman School, and includes work produced in graduate architecture urban housing studios at Weitzman alongside illustrated essays by leading professionals.
Of the book’s wide-ranging contributors, Jamelle says in the introduction to “Under Pressure,” “Its authors represent a broad spectrum of thought leaders from fields including architecture, material design, economics, finance, and real estate. Collectively, the perspectives here maintain that urban housing should be viewed as a confluence of pressures from multiple agents. Pressures are emphasized as sites of agency and effectivity for architects projecting toward the future of urban life, and they are shown to work at different scales ranging from the global economy to cities, industry, buildings, and individuals themselves.”
The book has four frameworks for analyzing and acting upon the pressures affecting urban housing: Learning from history, changing domesticities, housing finance and policy, and design and material innovation. The essays in this book are complemented by urban housing design studies created by students from Weitzman’s Department of Architecture which serve to contextualize and highlight the most relevant and provocative issues in each project. The studies provide focused responses to concepts raised in and across the book’s distinct parts as well as visual and hypothetical roadmaps for how specific concepts can be realized, and suggest new formal identities for housing design, elevating the typology’s status through careful, highly articulated designs.
Read more at Weitzman News.
