Essays on the single-family housing type and its future
Description
Despite the increasing interest in reuse and circularity, little attention has been paid to the task
of transforming the extensive residential territories made up of single-family houses built in the
second half of the twentieth century in many Western countries. Yet changing demographics,
socio-economic transformations, shifts in housing preferences linked to the awareness of the
costs embedded in such models, and the attractiveness of the city as a productive space have
exposed the financial, material, and cultural crisis facing these settlements. In light of such trends
and given the sheer size of the phenomenon, retrofitting the single-family housing stock to make
it more consistent with socio-economic changes can be regarded as one of the most urgent,
unresolved issues in architecture and urban design today. The book investigates the potentials
inherent in transforming of the single-family house in different geographical contexts by a group
of emerging and established scholars from the US, Europe, and Australia.
Martino Tattara is an architect and associate professor of architectural design in the Department
of Architecture at KU Leuven. Federico Zanfi is an architect and associate professor of urban
planning and design at Politecnico di Milano
