Reimagining Home for Refugees and Homeless

2023

Sector: Housing, Community

Location: Vacant department stores across UK

Status: National competition entry

Homelessness, in Martin Heidegger, a philosopher of the 20th century, is a modi cation of home.

Home, in Jeff Malpas, a contemporary architectural philosopher, contains homelessness within it, as both a possibility and a presence.

Home carries within it two modes: the rst is being at home, and the second is being estranged from home. Home and homelessness are thus not two separate modes but one – homelessness itself being a mode of home.

In the city centre area where department stores have been fading from the highstreets, this design research tends to return to this decaying typology by reinterpreting its familiar form and the structure as found in a creative reuse for refugees and homeless.

Vacant department stores are still robust shelters with existing circulations, ventilations, facilities, which have strong capacity for flexible temporary living structures of multiple sizes and supporting programs to integrate with. Their urban locations also provide good access to social amenities, support networks, and community resources, which are key to the dwelling and re-dwell for refugees and homeless.

The department stores’ ubiquity means the model of reuse and reappropriation might be transportable, and can be unpacked and replicated.

However, the broader aim of this ongoing research by architectural design is to explore the “type”, rather than providing the “model”, with the former refers to the conceptual reference and the latter refers to the physical precedent.

If home is a fundamental type of place-making and world-making, it is also that of the human condition. Home sustains, balances and opens both a form of interiority, and a form of exteriority.

This is exactly that which contemporary architecture itself has the potential to bring forth, to reuse, and to reimagine.

STUDIO CLOUD in collaboration with Kien Pham Workshop and Claire Blundell-Jones.

Project exhibited as part of Migration Matters Festival 2023

16-24 June 2023 @ Soft Ground, The Moor, Sheffield