School lecture series at EPFL Architecture
Tuesday November 12 2024
EPFL, Foyer SG
This lecture is part of the lecture series "Affordable Housing: Six Exemplary Projects"
Vivoli is an ‘environment of spaces’, enclosed, semi-open and open. These spaces construct an opportunity for numerous activities at different times of the day in the house and in the community. It offers multifunctional spaces within the single unit where the user can create different living patterns based on different times of the day avoiding the stereotypical jail cell-like flats that people are forced to buy. Instead, it offers a place that fosters community living in apartments that behave like homes.
Rohan Chavan started his practice in Mumbai in 2015 to work on projects related to public and community sanitation, urban design, affordable housing, single-family homes and institutions. His approach toward living patterns and bold spaces are the highlights of its design practice. He believes architecture as a science emerged from man’s humble need for shelter. A home is the purest form of design.
00:00 Introduction by Pier Vittorio Aureli
03:07 Introduction by Akshar Gajjar
04:27 Lecture by Rohan Chavan
56:53 Q&A
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"Affordable Housing: Six Exemplary Projects"
For the Fall 2024 Lecture Series, the School of Architecture at EPFL has gathered six housing projects that address affordable housing in an exemplary way. Each guest will present one project and explain in detail what it means to produce good and affordable housing from commission to inhabitation. The aim of these lectures is to not stare too romantically at affordable housing, but rather to show how building affordable housing is both difficult and possible. The lecture series will be inaugurated by philosopher Emanuele Coccia - author of the acclaimed book The Philosophy of Home - who will introduce the house as a place where to imagine new and unprecedented communities that can challenge the way in which we build and inhabit housing today.
In the last decade, housing is back in the architects’ agenda. Yet, renewed interest in housing corresponds to a historical moment in which, more than ever, housing is considered a commodity to be bought, sold and rented rather than a space to inhabit. While in the hey-day of the welfare state, legions of architects - often employed by the state - had the chance to develop large-scale housing complexes, and to experiment with unprecedented possibilities in terms of typology and technology, today affordable housing is reduced to few interventions in a desolate sea of commodified urbanization. Yet, in spite of these hostile conditions, some recent housing projects have managed to reformulate what affordable housing can be in the 21th century. Although these projects do not match (yet) the scale and quantity of their 20th century predecessors, they are innovative especially in terms of how people can live together more collectively and by allowing new types of households