2016
Hus for den evige student
House of the Eternal Student
Mari Synnøve Gjertsen
Housing is an asset, a commodity that can be traded as any other, priced for its exchange-value, not its use-value. As Reinhold Martin argues “(…) real estate development is fundamentally speculative. It is premised on the rise in value in a piece of land or property, in the expectation that its resale value be higher than the original payment made.”1 The few who can afford it can benefit greatly from real estate speculation by owning, buying, building and selling real estate. The greater part of the population is forced to participate in the speculator's market because the alternative is homelessness2 and the great incentive to buy forces them to take on debt.
On the other side social code rules, and housing “take the white, middle-class, heterosexual, patriarchal family as their tacit model”3 creating the minimal standard required to meet this imagined household’s needs. Therefore it is not only wealth, but also a certain life-style that is favoured, forcing society to conform to the criteria of a golden mean of mediocrity.
The young usually do not meet either the criteria for wealth or family, although they are expected to do so in the not so far future. This has not gone unnoticed by the developers and they claim to have the solution to the problem ‘of getting the young into the housing market’. The studio flat has become the standard household for the young and single, and developers continue to build these small apartments to meet the new market demands of a young single urban dweller. It is also no coincidence that developers favour the studio flat as the profit of the block in general rises according to how many units it accommodates. More and more people are living alone, (giving developers even more incentive to build smaller and smaller,) in the United States it is the most common household, but it is also the one most associated with unhappiness and poor mental health. 4
Social code dictates housing development, but it is also created by it. As Martin describes “(…) architecture also governs. It does so subtly and discreetly, less through monumental symbols or monolithic institutions than through the everyday practices by which houses and apartments are designed, built, bought, sold, and financed.”5 Through a standard set of architectural parameters, and marketing schemes, real estate development try to define an ideal lifestyle that for many of us is far from it. The dream that the invisible hand of the private market would deliver all the variety of housing demanded by a diverse population has brutally crashed and failed. The need for a new type of housing development emerges.
Rethinking social housing is the point from which to address and reverse the market driven logic that defines real estate today. Here we can avoid the hysteria of the market because the venture does not need to be profitable beyond covering building cost and maintenance. However, there is a stigma associated with social housing, as it is left to the poor, unemployed and the outcasts unable to enter the private housing market. Therefore it is easier to reconsider social housing with a different type of communal housing, namely student housing. Here it is possible to re-evaluate the common idea of the household as none of the inhabitants meet the standard criteria of the real estate market, and are not considered outcasts.
When knowledge, creativity, social exchange and entrepreneurship have become the basis of our modern economy, education becomes a crucial element of the labour power. Because of this students live under an increasing pressure to acquire knowledge that satisfy market demands. As a result some knowledge is rendered more valuable than other. In the words of Aureli (although he states that it might be a slight oversimplification) “While departments and universities of applied research, especially in the fields of engineering and science, are well-funded because of their immediate usefulness in the market, the humanities suffer from lack of investment, and thus are seen as increasingly irrelevant in the face of market pressure.”6 The same can be said about time spent and amount studied. If you lower the time needed for production you lower the cost and thereby increase the profit. Therefore the best student must be the one that finish fastest (with the best grades), these students are often referred to by financial media as ‘super-students’. The eternal student on the other hand enjoys studying to such an extent that the thought of entering the job-market/leaving it all behind produces a state of anxiety.
This project proposes the house of the eternal student as a response to the market logic inherent in both education and housing. In the house of the eternal students there are tenants from 3 different fields of study. These are picked randomly at an early stage in the planning process, to ensure that every field of study is given equal importance.
On the first floor there is a public library, with literature curated by and for the inhabitants. Each year they choose a group, representing the academic diversity in the composition of tenants, that are in charge of buying literature (with a certain amount of the rent). In this way you will get e.g. a library of art, nordic literature and structural engineering. Many libraries like this will pop up all over the city as there is built more student housing.
From the second floor and up there are housing inhabited by both single tenants, couples and families (couples with children as well as the single mother/father that accidentally met mr./ms. right now at a party). As their life situation changes the tenants will change apartments within the building. By sharing a great apartment, but still leaving room for privacy, each individual acquires more space, facilities and financial freedom. Building more student housing than there is students will provide the same model for others.
By reconsidering student housing not just as a phase of our lives, we could (re)discover different ways of living together that will give greater satisfaction than what exists today, and at the same time nourish knowledge production and housing that is not solely market orientated.
1 Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, Susanne Schindler, The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing and Real Estate, (New York: the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015) p.21
2 ibid. P.31
3 ibid. P.95
4 Charles Montgomery, Happy City; Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) p.128
5 R. Martin (2015) p.128
6 Pier Vittorio Aureli, Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, (Log 23, 2011) p.114
