"My settling/unsettling story begins with a knock on my door in the middle of the afternoon by a police officer shortly after moving to Calgary from Los Angeles in 2008.
It came to my attention that a group of thugs had broken into the apartment below me by first breaking into the apartment next to it and then blowing a whole through the party wall. That architecture made that act possible, that architecture itself is a body that participates in the dynamic landscapes that are our cities became of critical importance in this story.
The overall point: That migration actually deals with the transition from being individual to being part of a common population – a community – and that ideas of individuality and privacy are actually challenged when a transition is made to larger populations. This not only applies to people, but the built environment.
Perhaps there is no more obvious corollary between individuals and the built environment than the single family home. Looking at population growth and its relationship to suburban sprawl where the aggregation of individual built forms for individuals becomes a thing in and of itself while intensifying under their own pressure. Questions of autonomy and individuality become directly challenged when behaviours of the community begin to erode or subtract from the individuals that constitute the social field."
Joshua Taron is an Assistant Professor of Architecture in EVDS where he co-directs the Laboratory for Integrative Design [LID]. To view the complete online version of Taron's feature in the Journal of Computational Media Design on pages 15-25, click here.
For the printable PDF version, click here.