What inflections are relevant to current (and future) architectural discourse on dwelling? Can these discussions be more strategically ‘fluid’ by shifting knowingly between scales, subjects and methodologies? Can these move beyond existing affiliations, for instance to specific geographical areas (vernacular and disaster typologies are frequent topics for developing countries) and/or cultural/economic structures (psycho-social or consumerist fantasies, and the demonstration of avant garde designs, typically linked to advanced economies)?

The relationship between dwelling, housing, domesticity and architecture remains tenuous yet often loosely articulated. The term ‘dwelling’ necessarily forces one to consider the traffic between these discrete terms, and where one’s subject(s) may be firmly, though not exclusively, positioned. Dwelling’s ambiguity calls for a critical repositioning within current architectural discourse.

This session adopts two contexts for thinking through these questions. First, the emerging location of Asia as the site of new modalities of dwelling, bound as it were to particular socio-cultural and political tendencies such as filial piety, the suppression of the individual over the importance of family, the affinity to tradition and simultaneously but conversely, the will to expand and progress with unbridled inhibition. Second, the site of academia, the home ground of architectural research and design as generative of speculative responses to what it means to dwell.

This session is interested in unraveling the reconceptualization of ‘dwelling’ within a non-Western tradition. It recognizes late industrial modalities and recent developments in Asia as viable research grounds for rethinking questions of modernity and the post-colonial. Papers which critically reposition the term ‘dwelling’ in relation to housing, domesticity, and architecture within the physical, social, cultural and imaginative geographies of Asia and/or its academic contexts are welcomed.