In order to look to the future of housing, it is imperative to glance back and understand where we have come from in order to propose where we will be going next.
Within the current state of housing throughout the world, we tend to look more universally. We look for solutions that can be applied holistically across any and all areas, people, and social status. Universal culture stems from the previous relationship to the ever connected world, something that modernism started, and parametricism has finished. In terms of the global economies and the internet of things, technology, commerce, and culture have all become intertwined and numbed to the specificities of the individual. For the past few decades, people were coincided as a cog in a machine, an atom in an ocean, just one part of an ever connected web. We hold this as a constant and see that there is a necessity in this realization, but the ebbs and flows of our culture and the state of our cities today, there has become a shift in this thinking.
Across the globe, localization has become a large topic of discussion. History, culture, and social behavior are at the forefront of discussion in all areas including the physical and digital realms. It means that in today’s society, the relationship between us and our history is at utmost importance. Where we situate ourselves in a great historical lineage begins to give an idea of our identity. We can consider that context, whether its environmental, cultural, societal, or historical, is what defines ourselves and our lives. So in turn, context is the greatest drivers to who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.
The house of the future needs to understand its context in the greater historical lineage; its environmental, cultural, societal, and historical context. The house of the future relies on us to define what it is and how it should be. We need to have a house that fits into our lives but more importantly, it should help make our lives better, more enjoyable, and overall help to remind us of our own context.
We propose the house of the future in Dubai as a relationship between human and nature, past and future, and public and private. By looking back to historical housing and the vernacular villages in historical Dubai, we have found queues to social, private, flexible, and ambient spaces that all factor into the design. By creating a new type of housing, we have begun to proposed a flexible and adaptive house that changes from season to season, from event to event, and even day to day.
The house is built around a large voided central gathering space that contains an outdoor Majlis and communal kitchen. Both are adjacent to enclosed and private living-room, dining-room and kitchen, with the ability to open up the full floor to connect each of these social spaces on certain occasions. All of this while maintaining