A Highrise Urban Village: Tectonic Mutation in a Design Studio

This paper presents the design exploration of a studio conducted at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The study began with the premise that high-rise housing in Honolulu is not a viable solution within such a unique natural and urban setting. Students have challenged the issue by testing and experimenting on a variety of distinct housing alternatives within the studio. The studio then introduced some pedagogical agenda of housing to students and required an analytical project that focused on the dwelling and its collective form to elucidate fundamentals of housing design. This study laid the groundwork of each student's design development throughout the project, upon completion a variety of different designs and solutions were proposed responded to distinct themes and problems. In this article, different types of housing prototypes and their distinctive clustering as a unique urban village as a whole are shown, and the final model of the studio as a collective form is presented. In conclusion, the pedagogical value of the design studio is discussed.