ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2025How to Live Together: A Studio on Architecture, Aging, and the Commons
This studio positions our university campus as both site and subject for architectural speculation. We take the North Campus Innovation District, an emergent mixed-use zone in the University of Michigan’s Campus Plan 2050, as a testing ground for proposing radical models of collective life.
The brief: design an intergenerational co-living complex that redefines the relationship between domestic and civic space. Not a dorm with a few elder units tacked on, nor a senior housing facility with a student lounge. Rather, a rethinking of domestic and civic life - an architecture where housing, public programs, and institutional infrastructure are conceived together, operating as a single, interdependent whole.
Two frames anchor the inquiry. First, the demographic: by 2050, one in four Americans will be over 65, even as social isolation intensifies across all generations. Second, the institutional: universities function as self-contained cities, with housing, food systems, transit, healthcare, libraries, and governance: yet their role in civic society remains under-articulated, underappreciated, and under political attack. The studio asks how architectural form can make that civic role more tangible, reaffirming the university as an agent of shared public benefit.
We will interrogate co-living as both a political and an architectural project, resisting the privatization of care, dismantling the spatial separation of life stages, and designing for the friction, reciprocity, and difference inherent in collective life. Accessible design will be approached not as a question of code compliance, but as a core spatial ethic, embedded from the outset as a generative design principle. Universal design, understood as creating environments usable by the widest range of people, benefits everyone, not only those who are conventionally perceived to “need” it.