Party Wall Housing: Objects in Environments as Contestation

Abstract

The front line of architecture is the housing crisis, but is also a crisis of how we live. The home is where structural principles of society are created and reinforced. The city has become an all-encompassing domestic environment. Differentiation of work, domestic labour, socialization, rest, leisure, and exchange are no longer understood as separate domains, but as part of the same productive system. Artists and creative workers are challenged by the reduction of affordable work space and storefronts in the city. Market-driven developer housing is further pressuring the building stock in Halifax. The project establishes a communal housing prototype to revive a live-work housing model, resisting market exploitation and capitalist understandings of private property. The proposal redefines spatial conditions of the row house, a common typology in Halifax. The party wall, typically a wall dividing two individuated units, is expanded to provide space and objects for collective negotiation.