(03 Assembly Required)
Assembly Required
Should architects go on building for the market? We need low cost housing in our cities. Space is not a luxury – but a necessity! Housing should be a public value that relates to other common goods. We need new ways to build without using up the world’s resources. — Raumlabor (Shabbyshabby Apartments)
A Manual for Public-Private Dissolution
Assembly Required not only addresses the affordable housing crisis facing most of the urbanized world today, it aspires to challenge the increasingly ubiquitous issue of the private appropriating all that is public. Assembly Required offers a moment in which the market-driven divide between public and private is dismantled. It uses the domestic icon of the pitched-roof ‘house’, which disassembles during the day into separate components for public use and social assembly. During the day, the dwelling demands that friends and strangers assemble to disassemble the house for its public use in any configuration they choose. As evening approaches, all will work together again to reassemble the components into the single dwelling, where public sleeping quarters are offered as well. Material-wise, we are creating plastic, insulating textiles from discarded plastic shopping bags, packing peanuts, and used garments, as well as salvaged lumber, nails, grommets and twine, at little to no cost. The site allows for a juxtaposition between the underused, formal public square (Max Joseph Platz) and luxury commercial boulevard (Maximillianstraße); this demonstrates our protest against the private-driven status quo, while the surrounding State Opera and Residenz Theatre lends itself to becoming a kind of “theater of the public”. Assembly Required asserts that the public is not for sale and that the public and private can engage with each other in a way that enhances the quality of collective urban life.