The Domestic Public: Territoriality in Shared Space

Abstract

Shared housing in North America is largely inadequate, because ideas of collective ownership are incompatible with contemporary views on private property. The thrust of the thesis is to investigate more fundamentally what it means to share space, identifying ways it can be more deeply manifested through architecture. This investigation first interrogates the ways that the public ultimately becomes private in housing, paying attention to the nature of boundaries and apertures and the sequence of threshold spaces these boundaries delineate. The result of this is a set of design principles, which are implemented towards a co-housing project sited in Halifax’s South End, using two schemes geared towards different user groups, implementing the concept of what I’ll be referring to as the domestic public. This is given further theoretical support through precedent analysis, investigation of Dutch Structuralist in-between concepts, and the distilling of these concepts into a more fundamental framework centering territoriology.