Post-Pandemic Urbanism: Regenerating Suburbia Through ADU Architecture

Dahl Per-Johan

2021

Dahl, Per-Johan. 2021. “Post-Pandemic Urbanism: Regenerating Suburbia Through ADU Architecture” World Architecture/Shijie Jianzhu 2021 (8): 108-113

ISSN 1002-4832

The Accessory Dwelling Unit – abbreviated ADU – encompasses an emergent building type with such potential. Surfacing in the 1970s as an informal response to the cultural and spatial restructurings of North American cities, the ADU gained disciplinary grounds in the early twenty-first century […].
This article takes the American ADU prototype BIHOME by Kevin Daly Architects/cityLAB-UCLA as an object of study to extrapolate intersections between architectural interventions, suburban culture, and the memory of place. Then, shifting focus to a European context, the article will explore two ADUs – Unit C in Sweden by smogstudio, and STONED in Italy by Elastico Farm – where creative ADU designs were used to critically review paradoxical conditions in preservation guidelines. Designed for establishing different connections with the main building on a single-family plot, the three projects combine to extrapolate a series of concepts feasible to use when updating the premise of suburbia.