Housing Futures conference 2018
An international cast of influential architects, urbanists and academics will present at the 2018 Housing Futures conference at Sydney’s Eternity Playhouse on 27 July.
Australia’s cities are being stretched, prodded, rearranged and transformed by the forces of rapid urbanisation, densification and technological and economic change. The Housing Futures conference will speculate on the ways that architects, designers, planners, developers and policymakers can address these concerns, while contributing to a liveable, sustainable future.
“Within this period of rapid change and growth in Australia, we not only need to think about where we will live, but also how we will live,” says Katelin Butler, editor of Houses magazine. “This raises a number of complex issues, including what makes a residential development work, how we regulate the quality of what is built, how we create community, and how this affects our living standards and expectations.”
The one-day forum will feature four keynote addresses and three case studies covering the breadth of issues and developments affecting housing today.
Saskia Sassen, the internationally renowned Dutch-American sociologist and member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, will deliver one of the keynote addresses. An authority on urban sociology, Sassen is a key contributor to the evolving discourse around globalisation and transnationalism. She is credited with coining the term “global city.”
Go Hasegawa, founder of the award-winning Tokyo practice Go Hasegawa and Associates, will present a keynote tiled “Elastic Space,” exploring the divisions inherent in housing, from the inside/outside division to the private/common/public division. “Beyond the clear, transparent, static spaces that have been produced, I aim to make more ambiguous, translucent and elastic space in housing projects,” he states.
Hailing from Chicago, Alison Von Glinow, the founding director of Kwong Von Glinow, will share the projects of her office that explore overlooked elements of what constitute a home: from storage, to circulation, to unit identity. She will explain her studio’s design approach, encapsulated in the phrase “enjoy architecture” and discuss what it means to “search for a relatable future in housing.”
Candalepas Associates founding director Angelo Candalepas will present “Flat buildings and the act of architecture,” in which he will explore future implications of the design of apartment buildings. “We will be judged by future generations by how we perform this phenomenon we call urban consolidation,” he states.
Among the forum’s case studies is Nightingale Village, the first precinct of apartment-scale deliberative development in Australia, presented by Nightingale urban designer Andy Fergus. Additionally, Jacqui Alexander of Alexander Sheridan Architecture will explore the impacts of the sharing economy on residential architecture in “On-Demand Domesticity,” and Philip Oldfield, senior lecturer in architecture at the University of New South Wales, will present “Gardens in the Sky: Experiences of Communal Spaces at Height in Singapore.”
More green updates
