AR Reading List 049: non-nuclear households

‘Non-nuclear family households are typically treated as aberrations or add-ons in discussions of living arrangements in the Anglosphere,’ writes Helen Hester in the Keynote of the March issue. The traditional nuclear family structure has long been considered the norm – those that fall outside must adapt the existing spatial structures they inherit, carve out their own spaces in the cracks of the typical models of living. This week’s Reading List turns to alternative structures that have emerged as a result of imagining different ways of living together.

Family matters: in the bubble of the nuclear household, AR March 2021, Helen Hester
‘The bubble problematises the notion of the self-contained household or self-sufficient working family, foregrounding instead a generalised state of social interdependence’

Doctors’ housing in Rwanda by Mass Design Group, AR June 2014, Phineas Harper
‘The lure of metropolitan city life tends to draw medical professionals away from rural areas after short placements, so the four split-level houses which make up Healing Hill are an attempt to reverse that flow’

Dominican Monastery of La Tourette by Le Corbusier (Eveux-Sur-Arbresle, France), AR June 1961, Colin Rowe
‘There is a movement from the brilliance and lateral extension of the refectory and chapter house, through the more somber tonality of the library and oratory, up to the relative darkness and lateral closure of the cells’

Veiled in secrecy: The Habitat for Orphan Girls by ZAV Architects, Iran, AR July/August 2018, Mehr Shafiei
‘The simple elegance of the four-storey structure belies the complexities and controversies of the project. Khansar is an exceedingly conservative place and state representatives made highly restrictive demands’

Peripheral vision: La Dunette sheltered housing, Huningue, France by Dominique Coulon & Associé​s, AR May 2019, Catherine Slessor
‘The aim was to cultivate a benevolent atmosphere and avoid any sense of this feeling like an institution’

Medina morphology for large artificial family: SOS Children’s Village in Djibouti by Urko Sanchez, AR May 2017, Manon Mollard
‘The translation of nomadic habits into tectonic form proves a thorny task, and a permanent architectural construct instigates new lifestyle demands’

Hertzberger’s framework for care, AR February 1976, Sutherland Lyall
‘The theoretical basis of his work is a belief that the only way to end the alienation that exists between modern architecture and its users is to involve the occupants of his buildings in the physical formation of their own environment’