Urban Types. Von Häusern und Menschen.

Based on the biographies of houses and inhabitants, the seminar pursues the motif of investigating and tracing housing as a practice on different scales and with diverse methods (videography, interviews, observation, drawings and document analysis). By means of individual case studies of buildings and residents, the seminar asks about connections between history, structure, materiality, construction, laws, policies, rules, norms, typologies and use. How are the buildings constructed and built? How are they used and inhabited? What political, social, economic, familial, cultural conditions are expressed in them? The material is collected at different levels of scale in the consideration of different time periods of past, present and envisaged future. The evaluation and designing of possible futures can then be made productive through the development of scenarios on the basis of the data collected. The format “Urban Types. Von Häusern und Menschen“ enables a discussion of the different urban types and typologies of living and dwelling. It looks for new cases, examples, contrasts, overlaps and perceptions through the everyday practice of living and active participation in research and design. As a learning and teaching platform, “Urban Types. Von Häusern und Menschen“ is a seminar funded by the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) and located interdisciplinarily between architecture and urban design.