Active Architecture.
Speculative urban superblock
Who decides how a home is lived in?
A home is usually designed before its inhabitants arrive. Their routines, relationships, and needs keep changing long after the walls are fixed. Active Architecture asks what happens when the architect designs a framework—and leaves residents room to shape the spaces within it.
The thesis starts with an everyday ambition: a home that can accommodate both being alone and being together, without prescribing one permanent way of living.
Sharing a home does not mean sharing every moment.
The domestic research considers younger tenants living in the homes of older residents. Their lives overlap, but their needs for privacy and contact do not always coincide. A fixed partition protects autonomy while also limiting exchange. The project treats this tension as a question of how a boundary can be negotiated, rather than where a wall should be drawn once and for all.
The study explores a range of boundaries and connections. The architectural question is how to offer different degrees of contact without requiring constant interaction.
The architect sets the framework. The inhabitant shapes the room.
Give change something to work with.
Drawing on No-Stop City, Superstudio, and mass customization, the thesis shifts the architect’s role from composing a finished object to defining an adaptable system. A stable grid, structure, circulation, and services provide continuity. Movable partitions and adjustable thresholds allow occupation to change within that framework.
A common set of structural and spatial rules supports the building. Stability makes adaptation possible without requiring the entire framework to change.
Partitions operate within the shared grid. Their different positions alter the relationship between spaces while the underlying order remains legible.
A wall becomes a choice.
Movable walls, sliding panels, and rotating screens turn a fixed division into an adjustable relationship. Rooms can expand, separate, or overlap as residents negotiate privacy and shared activity. The prototype and plan explore this proposition at different scales: the mechanism of a boundary, and the domestic spaces it helps organise.
A physical prototype investigates the movable partition as a mechanism. It brings the thesis from a spatial proposition into a material experiment.
The plan situates adjustable boundaries within a larger domestic arrangement. The question is what a change permits: retreat, passage, shared activity, or a new relationship between rooms.
Repeat the support. Leave life open.
The system-and-element logic extends beyond one household. A shared structural field accommodates dwellings alongside courtyards, gardens, circulation, and communal spaces. Repetition establishes a framework for different patterns of occupation rather than a single ideal household. At the scale of public space, elements combining shelves, seating, and frames can give an open area smaller places to inhabit.
Read the repeated structural field alongside its varied spaces of occupation. Housing and shared landscapes belong to the same framework, allowing the domestic inquiry to expand into collective life.
The axonometric drawing reveals relationships that a grid alone cannot convey: how partitions, routes, planting, and shared spaces meet at the scale of occupation.
A framework is only a beginning.
The section and interior return the argument to lived space. Static supports coexist with softer thresholds, light, and connections between levels. Architecture supplies the means for adjustment; the inhabitants give those possibilities meaning through use. The project remains deliberately open-ended.
The section brings stable construction and changing occupation into one view, connecting interior levels with light and landscape.
The interior offers one possible spatial atmosphere within the system. It is an illustration of inhabitation, not a final arrangement that every resident must accept.
From form-giver to system-maker
Design the capacity to change.
The thesis locates architectural authorship in the framework, while leaving the spatial outcome open to its inhabitants. The home can remain coherent without being complete once and for all.
Back to the beginning ↑- Location
- Speculative urban superblock
- Studio
- UC Berkeley M.Arch Thesis - ARCH 204
- Instructor
- Tomas Mckay Alliende, Kyle Steinfeld
- Collaboration
- Individual work