Suburban Counter Culture
Suburban Counter Culture considers the implications of progressive trends in domestic habits through the design of a residential settlement, community amenities, and an urban strategy. Located in Cooksville Mississauga adjacent to a forthcoming mobility hub, this project provides a new residential form that bridges the gap between tower residences and the low-rise sprawling forms of suburbia. This project gives emphasis to ground floor activity which provides the neighbourhood with community kitchens within a domestic setting. Suburban Counter Culture shifts domesticity to the public realm as a strategy to reimagine the suburban narrative as a prescient built environment for shared living practices.
The unassuming architectural forms knit into a small site that complete a pedestrian corridor between residential neighbourhoods and the Cooksville GO transit hub. Each residence centres around a semi-public rentable kitchen and a shared private kitchen accessible to the residents of the site. Each unit is autonomous with minimal individual kitchen-specific space, making the ground floor the focus of domestic labour.
Domestic labour and affective labour are activities that have become normalized and as a consequence taken for granted. There is an urgency to address spatial and social domestic practices in order to prioritize domestic labour as a valued vocation to continue human existence. Suburban Counter Culture challenges the typical private space of domestic labour and establishes the suburban narrative as a landscape for contemporary living practices.