THE DOMESTIC NOMAD

FIRST PLACE
Integrated Studio Overall Design Award 2024

FIRST PLACE
Home of the Next Century

Site: Chicago, IL
Team: Yue Zhuo
Instructor: Marcos Parga

May, 2024

NOMAD [1]: a member of a people who have no fixed residence but move from place to place usually seasonally and within a well-defined boundary

Gilles Deleuze, in his book A Thousand Plateaus, articulated the concept of the Nomad as an act of deterritorialization, an inquiry of smooth space without imposed political boundary. Nomadism on a domestic scale and a contemporary context manifests in challenging the private unit with pre-determined enclosures driven by the market, limiting other possibility of domestic living.

Our project, rather than a housing solution, serves as a statement and provocation that challenges the prevailing capitalist market's rigid residential housing models, in which most domestic activities happen in the private and interior. Rethinking household activities, we propose that most domestic programs can take place in a public/communal settings and seasonally outdoor (see the program diagram, with green text signifying activities that can migrate indoor/outdoor), even in cold climates like Chicago, our site. Through grouping programs that requires a similar thermal comfort and level of privacy, the project takes physical form as a generous framework, a stack of four distinct levels with an array of height, daylighting, accoustics, and thermal qualities. The goal is to minimize the privately-own spaces (the private bedrooms on level 3) but in return offer an array of shared experience on the other levels.

Consequently, all the design decisions are made to create distinct experiences on each level. To a achieve a level of criticality, the building systems and tectonics are comprehensively articulated to render this project as a plausible model and a versatile framework that can be iterated on alternative sites.

Creatures (a tribute to Hejduk's Victims, 1984) as Nomadic Apparatuses, serve as the protagonist of the entire project. These creatures carries practical function and metaphorical meanings beyond conventional furnitures. They move indoor and outdoor and spread across the neighborhood as shared infrastructure depending on time and season. They migrate to different levels through our 21st century Hearth (Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, 1851), a gigantic elevator, a verticle room. The Creatures challenge the constructed borders of space, enclosure, program, and privacy on a domestic scale.