This House Does Not Exist by Yidan Li

This House Does Not Exist

An exhibition of selected architectural images of unbuilt affordable housing 2010-present

First see,

2010-present Selected Architectural Images of Unbuilt Affordable Housing

then read.

In his essay “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing things Together,” Bruno Latour criticized the dangerous mysticism of believing in the power of isolating signs and symbols from anything else when researchers deal with prints and images. He stated that “Diagrams, lists, formulae, archives, engineering drawings, files, equations, dictionaries, collections and so on, depending on the way they are put into focus, may explain almost everything or almost nothing” and further questioned, “Everyone agrees that print, images, and writing are everywhere present, but how much explanatory burden can they carry? How many cognitive abilities may be, not only facilitated, but thoroughly explained by them?1” These questions are even more critical today as the technique of generating, presenting, and circulating images is more technologically complex than ever.

In the realm of architecture, a practice that cannot describe what it talks about with texts alone and needs to show things2, advanced image-producing software and techniques are broadly adopted professionally and pedagogically. The cognitive abilities and inabilities associated with architectural images concern the narrative of architecture. “This House Does not Exist” brings the philosophical curiosity of architectural images to bear upon the niche of unbuilt social housing proposals, bringing together the tension among the status of unbuilt, the anthropology tradition and complexity of social housing development, and architectural image technologies. The exhibition makes the claim that architecture’s primary ethic and significance exists in the process and context rather than the visual representations. The images thus serve as a tool, interface, and guidance rather than the purpose and content of the show per se.

When a social housing proposal is in an unbuilt state and can only be assessed as images, the intention of, and information from the original architectural proposal will be modified. This exhibition will display architectural proposals from online databases, weblog, magazines, archives, and text-to-image platforms. Audiences are encouraged to “first see, then read” to experience the distance between the goals and their realization and may generate zero-context images of social housing proposals through text-to-image AI. When AI produces architectural images as appealing as, and faster than human beings, it is necessary to review and refine the meaning of ‘making an architectural proposal.’

Section 1 On Urban Proposal

FCHA

Affordable Housing Proposal

Shenzhen, China

Fangcheng Architects developed this affordable housing proposal to build as many units as possible in the urban center of Shenzhen to improve social housing integration. The 6200 affordable housing units are arranged along major distributor roads such as Shennan Rd., Beihuan Rd., and Binhai Rd. These roads have a width of over 100 meters with greenbelts on either side, occupying 20% of the built area and dividing the urban area into homogenous fragments. Moreover, with no proper pedestrian system, these urban fragments are isolated by intense highway traffic.

Fengcheng Architects’ proposal, “bridge houses”, integrates the affordable housing blocks into the road system to enhance connectivity and livability. The designers proposed four prototypes: single bridge, mega bridge, platform bridge, and cascading bridge, each of which responses to the specific demands and challenges of the area. While primarily serving as a linkage, the single bridge also has retail space on the ground floor. The mega bridge sits in a dense high-rise area and aims to bring a diverse program to a large group of workers. The platform bridge generates ample open space and provides shared facilities with the populous urban villages. The cascading bridge overlooks the Shenzhen coast and gives a panoramic view, along with public sports facilities and restaurants. Residents can choose a 3*3*6m from the four types at an affordable price.

The “Bridge House” proposal deals with the persistent housing shortage in Shenzhen and the fragmented urban form due to existing affordable housing development. China experienced a radical urbanization process during the past few decades, and among the major cities Shenzhen stands as an unprecedented case of urban growth. The housing department of the Shenzhen government assigned several construction sites as the “focused area”, sites mainly outside of the urban centers or at the urban edges. The adverse outcomes of this decision, such as long travel time and the lack of urban resources and facilities, outweighed the positivity of the housing price drop. The residents complained about the inconvenience and about the segregation.

Some residents blame these negative qualities on the government’s top-down approach or the property developer’s irresponsibility. Most people will accept them as a trade-off for paying less for housing. Housing in Shenzhen is burdensome for migrant workers, most of whom live on low-pay service jobs, like factory work. Their average household income in 2015 was 2818 CNY (404.11 USD) per month3 before tax, while the average sales price of Baoan district, where the industry park is located, is 37000 CNY (5306 USD) per sq m. The government-assigned affordable housing for rent at 700 CNY (100.38 USD) or purchase at 10000 CNY (1434 USD) per sq m is almost the only dwelling option for the migrant workers, the builders of the Shenzhen miracle.

To sooth the financial pressure, local governments usually appropriate land to developers for financing, constructing, and selling. This development paradigm has enabled a high-efficient affordable housing construction in China, but usually lack thorough land analysis and not well integrated. This is the core issue that “The Bridge House” is tackling.

“The Bridge House” is a response to and reflection on Shenzhen’s affordable housing agenda. China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP) set the goal of constructing 36 million new housing units to increase the availability of affordable urban housing.4 Under the central government’s strategic plan, local governments are responsible for all the facilitation and management, including providing free land, reducing government charges and fees, and controlling developers’ profits to lower the housing price for qualified buyers.5 As part of the national FYP, the Shenzhen government proposed a fund-raising and construction plan for 240,000 affordable housing units with a 15.36 million square meters construction area.

Being an early step to visualize a thesis or antithesis of a national agenda, architectural proposals for affordable housing carry more than the rendered blocks and trees on images. While being appealing enough to attract funding and policy, these images are not comprehensive enough to reveal the rationales and context of an architectural proposal. Making architecture is not just about producing enticing images. 8

Section 2 On Conceptual Study

Dogma

Do you see me when we pass?

Brussels, Belgium

Dogma developed this housing proposal along with the Community Land Trust (CLT) Brussels, whose work primarily addresses the trend in land acquisition and is dedicated to making housing more inclusive. CLT’s methodology research is visualized by Dogma’s design strategy that enables residents to live together and argue for their own space through the elastic re-division as the residents need.6

Dogma defines the housing concept informing “Do you see me when we pass?” as “evolutive housing”, which follows the natural evolution of a family’s spatial need. The walls and frames are not static concrete but a modifiable cross-laminated timber (CLT) system, allowing the family to adjust the composition of their house.

The proposal has three parts: a siteless prototype for guideline testing, an application of the prototype to two specific areas where CLT will develop affordable housing, and an application on the unbuilt land of Brussels. This series is both experimental and practical, aiming to develop a repeatable housing model that combines affordability and density in Brussels, the city with a chronic crisis in housing production over the past two decades.7

Porotto and Ledent curated a Brussels housing genealogy as part of the research on the housing crisis in the city. The research identified the lack of diversity and urban inclusion due to the postwar trend of normalized dimensions of everyday spaces and regulating the household through standardized construction methods.8

Dogma’s proposal challenged the conventional nuclear family-oriented social housing form in Europe, echoing Brussels’s 2040 agenda’s vision of changing housing requirements in light of demographic structural changes. The reduced family size, increased youth and elderly population, and the diversity of households, they concluded, would require a more diverse and flexible living space. The flexibility of modifying the single unit can also accommodate more people who are eligible for and need affordable housing. In solving the housing crisis, constructing a new house is not always the best solution.

The rigidity of existing projects is a result of material selection and construction methods, as concluded by Porotto and Ledent. It also entails a struggle over space ownership, that these precisely defined housing units “trained dwellers in the virtues of a privately owned domestic space.”9 Dwellers adapt to the pre-set housing units, not vice-versa. To be more provocative, the dwellers have no control of their space.

Aligned with CLT’s manifesto of withdrawing housing from the market and reclaiming it as a universal human right,10 Dogma addresses the “original sin” of the housing crisis: the accessibility to land. Hence, they propose alternative ways of using land: the cooperative acquisition. In this sense, Dogma’s emphasis on the elasticity of determining, modifying, and using spaces by dwellers also emphasizes space (re)claiming.

Illustrating architectural images for the dwellers is very different from making strategic and administrative proposals in which images connect the designers’ resolutions directly to the users. In a research and prototype project like “Do you see me when we pass?”, images function as powerful tools for concept articulation and manifestation. The collage-styled visualization and step-by-step manual that guide dwellers to modify their living spaces create dynamic interactions between designers and their primary audiences.

Section 3 On Text-to-Image

N/A

/Prompt: Affordable housing design proposal for 150 units capacity lower income household in puerto rico

N/A

Dall-E generates this image in 10 seconds, following the prompt “Affordable housing, design, proposal, for 150 units capacity, lower income household, in Puerto Rico.” These fragmented words and terms guide this text-to-image model to create architectural images out of the expression of natural human language. Simply speaking, the architectural image generated by Dall-E comes straight out of the text; no research is involved in the image production process.

AI’s ever evolving ability to learn from humans has shifted the paradigm and challenged the definition of creating, which is particularly intriguing and controversial in the creative industry. The image shown is quite descriptive, looking like a study model with a segment of surroundings and blocks of buildings that matches the public imagination of affordable housing. This information is sufficient to potentially convince audiences that this image comes from an actual project, as the ones found on the project cascade of architecture weblogs like ArchDaily or Dezeen.

“Architects live and die by the images that are taken of their work, as these images alone are what most people see. For every person who visits a private house, there are maybe 10,000 who only view it as a photo,”11 so said the pivotal architectural photographer, Julius Shulman. Today, architecture companies prioritize the image’s appearance as more people assess and consume architecture via image-based media. However, images are never what they seem: they are always framed, cropped, and reflected. Viewing architecture only through an image is to release it from its context12 and only see through the frame. Producing an image is a job that Dall-Es are as competent at as human beings (or even more). However, the architects’ role is never inserting and combining buzzwords and creating state-of-art photorealistic images out of the buzzwords. An architect’s intelligence is in the reasoning and motivation behind a prompt. 14

Just like Dall-E, Midjourney and Lexica Art, among others, are also performing exceptionally in generating affordable housing images. These models can even recognize and produce geographic features and combine concepts, attributes, and styles. In a way, the textto-image models know precisely what they are doing, and they will only get smarter as they are fed by millions of data points each day.

Smarter image production means better meaning comprehension, realistic rendering, precise details, and style cloning. None of these is sufficient to demonstrate a socio-political tension between construction and land, dweller and government, or the implementation of a national agenda, questions this exhibition hopes to explore.

/Prompt: Affordable housing design proposal for 150 units capacity lower income household in puerto rico, green space, blocks of buildings, high density, enhanced accessibility to transit system, integrated to urban area, diversity, community

Images

1. FCHA, Affordable Housing Proposal, retrived from Archdaily

2. Traced from Google Map

3. FCHA, Affordable Housing Proposal

4. Affordable Housing Strategic Plan for 12th Five Year Plan, Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of Shenzhen, retrived from http://zjj.sz.gov.cn/

5. Logos of Bond Property and COFCO property, Google Image

6. The Great Hall of the People, Beijing, China. The place where people’s Congress sessions are held, Chinadaily

7. Public notice on incentivize affordable housing construction, Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of Shenzhen, retrived from http://zjj.sz.gov.cn/

8. FCHA, Affordable Housing Proposal

9. Housing Prototype by Dogma, retrived from Dogma’s project site

10. ibid.

11. ibid.

12. ibid.

13. Images generated by Midjourney, prompt: Affordable housing design proposal for 150 units capacity lower income household in puerto rico

14. Official website of Dall-E by OpenAI

15. Images generated by Lexica Art, prompt: Affordable housing design proposal for 150 units capacity lower income household in puerto rico

16. Image generated by Dall-E, prompt: Affordable housing design proposal for 150 units capacity lower income household in puerto rico

Endnotes

1 Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” AVANT. Pismo Awangardy Filozoficzno-Naukowej 3, no. 3 (December 31, 2011): 207–57.

2 ibid.

3 Yu Wang & Sangui Wang, “Shenzhen Manufacture Industrial Park Wokers’ Salary and Living Cost Evaluation,” Journal of Renmin University of China, no.4 (2017): 107-118.

4 Joseph Casey & Katherine Koleski, Backgrounder: China’s 12th Five-year Plan (U.S.-China Economic & Security, June 2011), 4.

5 Joyce Yanyun Man, “Affordable Housing in China,” Land Lines, no.1 (January, 2011): 16-20.

6 Fabioruolo For Dogma, “Do you see me when we pass?,” n.d., http://www.dogma.name/project/housing-forcommunity-land-trust-in-brussels/.

7 Alessandro Porotto & Gérald Ledent. “Crisis and Transition: Forms of Collective Housing in Brussels.” Buildings 11, no. 4 (April 14, 2021): 162.

8 Porotto et al., “Crisis and Transition: Forms of Collective Housing in Brussels.”

9 Pier Vittorio Aureli et al., “Promised Land: Housing from Commodification to Cooperation - Architecturee-Flux,”

10 Fabioruolo, “Do you see me when we pass?”

11 Julian Shelman, “VISUAL ACOUSTICS – THE MODERNISM OF JULIAN SHULMAN“, documentary film, Director: Eric Bricker, USA (2008).

12 Schaerer, Philipp, “Built Images: On the Visual Aestheticization of Today’s Architecture.” Transfer (April 5, 2017) http://www.transfer-arch.com/built-images/.