Nino Chen
Vernacular Holding Field
Somewhere Around Ordinary
Bread Cures All
DAGMO
Diverge
Mixed-Use-Houston
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Social Housing in Medical Center Houston
Not public. Not private. Shared.
DAGMO is a collective housing building that was initially conceived to support the Continuum of Care efforts to end chronic homelessness in Houston, and also to provide flexible affordable housing for care workers in the Texas Medical Center. DAGMO is designed, however, to accommodate evolving demographics and subjectivities. At its core, this housing model embodies the principles of care, collective life, and solidarity—with the proposition that for communal living to be vibrant, it is essential to maintain spaces for individuality, privacy, and nearness.
There is a missing dwelling typology in Houston; single-family homes encourage individual subjectivities and the solution is believed to be in high-rises that have only a handful of common spaces for hundreds of units.
DAGMO advocates for a reasonable density of housing where smaller shared spaces are scattered throughout the complex to increase the communal-space-to-housing units ratio in varying scales that can cater to the comfort of individuals, couples, families, extended families, or even bigger intentional communities. Hence we start from the most essential scale of a single-room-occupancy (SRO) unit, and develop modular units that are connected by shared spaces flexible to accommodate diverse subjectivities.
Collaborator: Maximilien Chong