The opportunity to acknowledge, study and assess volume housebuilding as a presentation of Britain’s housing stock is more pertinent now than ever before. As the discourse surrounding the ‘housing crisis’ finds itself in a maelstrom, architects can no longer afford to ignore and disparage the impact and value of the Volume Housebuilding Project – a unique petri-dish of successes and failures. This unit will therefore encourage a fresh, unbiased review of a phenomenon so ordinary that it warrants and deserves closer examination.

The fluid relationship between suburbia and the inner city is now a condition of privilege. As such, the 19th- and 20th-century dialogue between city and suburb has developed instead into a dialogue between city, suburb and exurb. A lack of affordable housing options now compels many would-be house buyers to migrate to the exurbs, rapidly raising demand for dwellings that the Volume Housebuilding Project has absorbed. This has generated an immediate, unchecked and untapped ecosystem that has so far eluded concerted appraisal.

To make sense of this condition and its impact, the unit will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, departing from the exclusivity of architectural critique and looking to other fields such as art, history, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy and psychology to understand human behaviour. We will explore the common misconceptions, aspirational hangovers, accepted norms and prevailing orthodoxies that inhibit societies from enacting meaningful change.

As opposed to typology, we will address typicality in search of alternative definitions of domesticity. Following the creation of a 1:1 piece of furniture that will encourage misbehaviour and the production of an alternative Design Guide to redefine the restrictive codes that shape our built environment from the inside out, students will design buildings to house a minimum of 100 people along the Metropolitan Railway line – the tract of land originally developed to alleviate London’s housing pressures. We will develop unbiased approaches to how we live with one another at all stages of our lives, exploring issues of mobility and hybridity, use and misuse, behaviour and misbehaviour, form and dysfunction.

To contextualise the peculiarities of the Volume Housebuilding Project in the UK, the unit will make a rail trip across Europe looking at contemporary and historic housing projects, visiting the studios of several established and emerging architects along the way.