A home-work pocket neighbourhood in Shantang District, Suzhou.

Co-tutor: Guillermo Sánchez Sotés

“The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.”

Jane Jacobs (1961)

“Flexible working arrangements allow companies to meet present and future challenges by creating choice, accommodating generations, enabling complexity, and creating agility. But even if the benefits of flexibility are widely known, an understanding of how best to implement flexible working arrangements is crucial in avoiding difficulties”

Future of Work Institute Report (2012)

The idea of a quality work environment is attached to the beginning of massive industrialization in early Twenty Century. Firstly related to the employees’ protection from risks inherent in the job, the concept evolved in the 1970s including emotional values and human needs and aspirations, and it is nowadays rising popularity under the umbrella of the term Quality of Work Life (QWL). This increasing interest is not only due to the society’s demand for higher standards of living conditions—in a wider understanding of life that includes home and work—but also to the fact that companies recognize benefits from a more flexible way of working that results in better worker’s performance and higher productivity.

Working Space: *Playtime,* Jacques Tati, 1967

The Future of Work Institute reports that the traditional ways of working are no longer valid, as the landscape of work has been redefined by, mainly, four factors: advanced technologies, new societal values, changing demographics, and rapid globalization. New technologies make today easier than ever collaborations by distance in everyday more common multidisciplinary approaches, diluting the traditional hierarchies in a frequently net-based work process. Most of the contemporary societies are also deeply involved in a democratic push resulting in a growing societal demand for autonomy translated in the work environment by the worker’s desire of being able to customize their work environments for fitting it into their personal living conditions and styles. The change in demography is also an important factor in the transformation of the work atmospheres: the rapidly ageing work population will force us to a longer productive life with the result of every day more common multigenerational teams including people from up to five different generations--Baby Boomers, X, Y, Z, and iGen (the last two generations grew up in a connected world of social platforms and mobile technology). This fact requires the companies to be able to accommodate differences in the work environment due to diverse life-stages requirements. By last, the increasing globalization has created, on one hand, a mentality where consumers are expecting 24/7 access to good and services--whenever they are and whenever they want--and, on the other hand, a growing concern about sustainable grown that makes unpopular car commuting and office space energy expenses, as two of the biggest carbon emitters. Thus, flexibility in the work environment is urgently needed which will have an influence in the conventional design of work and living spaces. As architects, we need to reflect on how to shape this transformation.

Working Space: Google Offices, Boston, USA, 2016

In the Western culture, with a deeply rooted Taylorism throughout the twentieth century, cities have been planned in a functional segregated way, assigning different parts of the city to different activities (the so-called, zoning). With the exponential growth of the cities during last century, this situation became highly problematic. The zoning-based planning resulted in cities where growth is difficult to accommodate, where people are forced to long commuting, and where parts of the city end abandoned during some moments of the day. This functional segregation is unsustainable (prioritizing a city expansion in mono-functional zones that results in temporarily inactive fabrics), it causes social and economic segregations (through making economically inaccessible privileged parts of the city), and finally, produces an increasing inequality and social unhappiness in contemporary cities (Florida, 2017). All this situation was a consequence of a Twenty-Century way of thinking that is now obsolete, and it has to be reformulated.

If we look back to the pre-modern era, we will find that cities were based on a more dynamic functional and socio-economic mixture. From the mixture of programs that we can find at the Middle-Age cities (and their craftsman workshops houses), to the social cresol inhabiting the Eighteen Century housing buildings in cities as Paris or Barcelona (where facades showed the piling of different social strata), we appreciate an efficient diversity that fuelled the life of the urban contexts in past cities. The Eastern city historically offered an even more vivid environment what makes still more unfortunate the fact that new cities in the East are growing to replicate that western outdated model. Suzhou is not an exception to this fact.

The reformulation of the urban context must be accompanied by a reconfiguration of the home and workspaces as a compound. The home space has been affected by a deep transformation in the family models that it has been incompletely assumed through a consequential transformation of the domestic spaces. Single-parent families, multi-generational homes, multi-family people, and co-owned or co-rented homes, could be just some examples of the way in which the contemporary world has changed and the necessity of accomplishing this transformation in new architectural typologies. The workspace has also been the target of major changes—from new working tools to new working processes and ways to be displayed—that is urgently requiring a reconsideration of the working typology. The situation became highly interesting if we think about how these two transformations should come together through the invention of this home-work typology for the Twenty-first Century.

Intimate Space: Adolf and Lana Loos bedroom, 1903

By last, but not least important, working in China we must be all-time conscious of the dilemma between old and new that is affecting the architectural thinking and practice. The intensity of the Chinese history and tradition has been reflected in the high character of China’s historic architecture, without a clear statement about how contemporary architecture has to deal with it. Historic replicas and simulacra are common in contemporary Chinese architecture as a clear sign of the lack of this statement. Commercially very efficient, this illegitimate and disrespectful response to tradition must be culturally beaten reinforcing the discussion about how to front tradition in the Schools of Architecture. Literate architects with a clear understanding of the necessity of giving a contemporary and deferential response to tradition are the way to educate society. We must be equally proud of our historic tradition and our contemporary condition.

PROGRAM

In this FYP module, students will design a pocket neighborhood for a home-work community at Shangtang district. Through this topic is pretended that students will keep a simultaneous attention to social necessities, urban context, and building typologies, assuming the challenge of placing contemporary architecture in a traditional context.

The program basic requirements are:

-The pocket neighborhood design must contribute to the improvement and development of the urban context, accomplish some of the topics concluded in the urban analysis and providing a vision for the future of the site.

-The pocket neighborhood has to contain between five to ten home-work units (that it could mean between 1000 to 2000 sqm), and the communal spaces and facilities needed for encouraging community and urban life.

-All the units need to accomplish a different life and work style that it has to be defined by the student. The relationship between the different members of the community has to be explored for creating synergetic relationship inside the community for enriching people’s life and work.

Everything that is further than these basic requirements must be fixed by students as part of their proposal and narratives.

SITE

We will work in the Shantang district in Suzhou, specifically the part of the district around Shantang River limited in the northwest with the highway (Ring Road), and in the southeast with the subway line 2 that runs under Guangji road. This is a piece of the street about one kilometre long.

The spine of the Shangtang district is Shangtang Street that runs parallel to the Shantang River, a historically important canal opened during the Tang dynasty (618-907 B.C.) for linking the old town of Suzhou with the touristic place of Tiger Hill. The 1,200-year-old Shantang Street is on the list of China’s “National Historic and Cultural Streets”, and the whole area is under the Shantang “Historic-Cultural Protection Zone” inside the Master Plan of Suzhou. The place has a few historical buildings and some casual clustering of houses around small public yards that could provide a sense of what a pocket neighborhood is.

The Shangtang street is now a place where local people cohabit with national and international groups of tourists looking for the architectural heritage and the feeling of old Suzhou street and water landscapes. The Shangtang river is no longer the place of intense life that we can see at the famous painting “Prosperous Suzhou” (Xu Yang, 1759), where houses and shops were mostly open to it. Nowadays most of the houses and commerce are offered to the street with the river at the rear of the urban life, converted into a picturesque waterway for the tourist boats to Tiger Hill. The recuperation of the river as part of the city life and the potential derived from a stronger relationship with Shangtang street are some of the challenges that the site offers.