What's Next for Mom and Dad's House: Essays on the Single-Family Housing Type and Its Future confronts one of architecture's most underexamined problems: the vast stock of twentieth-century suburban single-family housing that demographic shifts, economic pressures, and ecological costs have rendered increasingly untenable.
About This Book
Across Western countries, the single-family house proliferated on an enormous scale in the postwar decades — and now that scale is the problem. Changing demographics, the financial and environmental costs embedded in low-density suburban models, and the renewed pull of urban living have exposed deep structural vulnerabilities in these settlements. Yet the architectural discipline has devoted relatively little serious attention to what to do with them. This collection of essays, drawing on scholarship from the US, Europe, and Australia, treats the retrofitting of the single-family housing stock as one of the most urgent live questions in residential architecture and urban design. It is essential reading for anyone working on housing futures, urban regeneration, or the politics of the built environment.
Key Features
- 223 pages of critical essays examining single-family housing transformation across multiple geographical contexts
- Edited by Martino Tattara and Federico Zanfi
- Contributors drawn from emerging and established scholars across the US, Europe, and Australia
- Published by Spector Books
What You'll Discover
- How shifting demographics and changing household structures are undermining the assumptions built into postwar suburban housing typologies
- The financial, material, and cultural crisis facing single-family residential settlements — and why architecture has been slow to respond
- Comparative perspectives on suburban retrofitting strategies across different national contexts, from the US to Europe to Australia
- Why reuse and circularity, despite growing interest in other building types, have not yet been applied at scale to the single-family housing stock
About the Author
This volume is edited by Martino Tattara and Federico Zanfi, who bring together a cross-disciplinary group of emerging and established scholars to address the transformation of single-family housing territories. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 223
- Dimensions: 160 x 230 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783959905816
- Publisher: Spector Books
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers engaged with housing futures, academics and students working in residential typology or urban regeneration, and policy-minded practitioners grappling with the long-term costs of suburban sprawl.