Vast vicinity: Learning from essential settling and dwelling

Abstract

'Sustainability' is the word of our time. 'Sprawl' is a problem of our time [1]. Apparently, given its full extent, housing based on individualistic image still sells better than rare sense for design appropriately fit to context and task. Thus, the notion of 'dwelling and settling' has extreme negative impact on the relationships between urban, rural, garden and house. Accounting for populist aesthetics, value-price-confusion, and prevailing land politics, the trivial and contradictory questions of principle remain: 'rural or urban?' - 'garden or house?' This paper explains an architectural research on the symbiotic propositions of settling with 'houses as gardens'. Working with the idea of 'as-well-as' instead of 'either-or' is a cardinal principle of this approach. The principle 'from the part to the entirety' is what defines these designs as 'urban modules', which have the potential to generate a truly coherent mosaic that constitutes a different settlement pattern that proposes an urban as well as rural future. It holds the promise of a way of settling and dwelling that is truly 'enduring'. © 2009 WIT Press.