What's Next for Mom and Dad’s House?

Despite the increasing interest in reuse and circularity, little attention has been paid to the task of transforming the extensive residential territories made up of single-family houses built in the second half of the twentieth century in many Western countries. Yet changing demographics, socio-economic transformations, shifts in housing preferences linked to the awareness of the costs embedded in such models, and the attractiveness of the city as a productive space have exposed the financial, material, and cultural crisis facing these settlements. In light of such trends and given the sheer size of the phenomenon, retrofitting the single-family housing stock to make it more consistent with socio-economic changes can be regarded as one of the most urgent, unresolved issues in architecture and urban design today. The book investigates the potentials inherent in transforming of the single-family house in different geographical contexts by a group of emerging and established scholars from the US, Europe, and Australia.

Martino Tattara is an architect and Professor of Housing and design in the Department of Architecture at TU Darmstadt. Federico Zanfi is an architect and Associate professor of Urban planning and design at Politecnico di Milano.