2304 Plans for a House with No-Style

Abstract

Even 30 years ago, some were already arguing that architecture was ‘stuck.’ Our profession, it seems, had become ‘exhausted’ or suspended in a kind of nihilism, producing simulacrums of the new, or else tirelessly reproducing variations on themes with no real historical, developmental, or progressive effects whatsoever. Yosuke Fujiki addressed this poverty in his entry to Shinkenchiku (New Architecture) magazine’s yearly Residential Design Competition in 1992, themed ‘A House with No Style’.

For the past three years, several aspiring architects have practiced a modified form of Fujiki’s exercise in a short workshop run by Limbo Press, each producing 48 plans in 48 hours or less – 2,304 in total. This short exercise is part of a larger pedagogical and architectural research agenda that explores the tendency of architecture towards the ‘non-typological’ culminating in a practice that re-addressing the question of type in architecture.