​New unit tutors Mark E Breeze and Katie Kasabalis discuss architectural experience, film-making and ideas of shelter

Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Thank you so much for joining me Mark and Katie, how did you come to develop the agenda for Dreaming Domesticity, Sheltering Speculations?

Mark E Breeze: Katie and I have both explored ideas of shelter and housing through different perspectives for quite some time now. The unit grew out of these shared interests.

I’m both an architect and a documentary filmmaker, so I’m very interested in the intersections and overlaps of these two disciplines. I’m fascinated by how filmmaking can help us practise and think about architecture differently, not only theoretically, but also practically throughout the whole architectural process from conceptual design to post-completion. Through my architectural, filmic, and written work I seek to explore the possibilities that each discipline offers to rethink the other.

As an architect I think the question of what ‘shelter’ is lies at the very heart of our discipline. I completed my postdoctorate last year on the Architectures of Displacement at University of Oxford looking at this very question through the lens of some of the most basic forms of shelter - emergency humanitarian shelters. Together with my colleague Tom Scott-Smith (Associate Professor at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford) we examined the range of these shelters across Europe and the Middle East in response to the so-called 2015 ‘Summer of Migration’. We sought to understand the aims, limits, possibilities, and realities of not only these shelters, but also of architectural design and thinking in that sheltering process. Indeed these shelter responses raise fundamental questions about notions of domesticity and what shelter can, can’t, and needs to do. And the primary tool we used for this research was the film camera, which also enabled us to bring this work and the questions it raises to a much wider audience through the resulting documentary series Shelter Without Shelter.

Katie Kasabalis: As an architect and an urban designer, I’ve long been interested in the intersection between architecture and the built environment. My work focuses on how housing and the workplace relate to one another within the larger urban context. Currently, I am leading a research project that looks at how innovation clusters change, adapt and mutate across three continents. What became clear to me very quickly is that the workplace cannot be studied in isolation - it relates to how cities are built and how housing is organised.

Over the past year Mark and I have talked a lot about our differing views towards shelter, and how this topic is often explored through either an economic development lens, or a policy lens, but not often through the human experience - something film really speaks to. The pandemic put those discussions quickly in perspective for us. Suddenly everyone’s relationship to shelter was radically different. We were stuck at home becoming ever more aware of the opportunities and limitations of our homes and our immediate neighbourhoods. Given these circumstances we thought that this was an ideal time to start a unit that uses film as a medium to question how we live today, and propose alternatives to how we can live tomorrow. Our students are across eleven different time zones and we already see similar attitudes, desires, struggles and dreams for the future emerging from their work.

Matthew: Filmmaking is a big part of the work of the unit, do the students have any prior experience of working with film?

Mark: We were clear during the student interview process that prior film experience wasn’t important for this unit. We are all so saturated by moving images in our daily lives that I believe everyone understands and speaks the basic language of film, even if they don’t explicitly realise it. The prevalence of advanced smartphones means that everyone has the means in their pockets to make short films. We’re not a filmmaking studio - the end goal is not necessarily to make purely filmic projects. This is not to undermine the value of a filmic training; we discuss the basic principles of film language, theory, and process, so the students understand the rules, norms, and traditions of film that they’re using and breaking. We want them to think architecturally using film.

We see filmmaking as an exploratory process - a technique and a tool of the architectural process, from conceptual development and site analysis, to design itself, and ultimately the representation of all its nuances. Film enables us to test, examine, and represent lived experiences and narratives, spatial qualities over time, and the experiential possibilities of design. For us it’s completely intertwined with architecture - it’s another tool in the box, a synthesis between different techniques. But we still very much value and demand beautiful ‘traditional’ architectural drawings as part of that process!

Katie: So far, we’ve found that it is a very productive exercise for students to move between mediums, to think about the experiential through film, and then think about how that space would look in more traditional forms of representation. The students are producing really unexpected work, which is extremely exciting.

Matthew: How have you brought these highly contested ideas of shelter and the domestic into their political and social context with the students?

Katie: We’re very keen for our students to develop their own methodologies. We want to give our students the tools to take their own critical positions, while developing their own experimental ways of working. As a group, we’re looking at case studies from all over the world, discussing issues of ecology, community and technology. We have invited a series of scholars and practitioners from around the world to give lectures to the unit: for example, the other week we had a Senior Design Strategist at Google Nest talking about domesticity and automation; and last week we had the Chair of the Architecture Department at the University of Virginia talk about his work on collecting housing models. In some ways, being remote is really helpful because we are able to invite a diverse array of people to speak to our unit.

Mark: Together with these lectures we help students think differently about ‘shelter’: the political, social, cultural, and economic aspects, along with key ideas of community and sustainability. What does a shelter need to do? When and how does a shelter become something else - such as a house, a home and/or an office - or constantly move between those ‘functions’? What is the role of architecture in that process? These are complex and rich questions, and the students are iterating and developing their own personal approaches to them.

One of the pleasures of the AA is the openness to exploring these complex and extremely contemporary ideas at the undergraduate level. It’s also fantastic that we have a whole year with students to work on this project; we both come from an American architectural education system where you have one semester per project. To suddenly have a whole year to investigate, test and develop these ideas is a little daunting but also exciting.

Katie: Another great thing about it is that the unit has the time to work at both the scale of the shelter, and that of the urban. We are using the moving image to describe and produce architecture; but at the end of the day, we want our students to think how shelter fits in the larger context. Our language when describing housing is so limited: we talk about one or two-bedroom houses or apartments, when the reality is so much more complex. How, where and with whom we live is at the core of what cities are about and so shelter is an important piece of the puzzle.

Mark: Although the current situation of having to work with our students spread all around the world through the two-dimensional pleasures of video is not ideal for anyone, it has actually had some benefits for our studio. Apart from the ironic fact that video calls make us all really appreciate the limits of two-dimensions, every one of us has become specialists in understanding the limits and the possibilities of restricted domestic space: bedrooms are now also workspaces, living spaces, sleeping spaces, and more. Every day is practice-based research for our unit!