Properly Property

This project recognises architecture as a discipline entangled with property. The central aim is to reconceptualise property and demonstrate that architecture can change our relationship to both property and land through new models for shared living and the formation of new laws. This project contends that architecture plays an important role in this, as a physical thing that is interpreted by the law. It is this idea that makes it possible for architecture to create (and amend) laws.

Through a series of property law case studies and disputes, the idea of property is found to be the legal condition of a particular resource as being 'proper-' to a particular person. This means that property has more to do with perceived ‘rightness’ than it does with ownership. The dispute is a mechanism that reveals conflicting understandings of the same thing. It is through a dispute that things are required to be put in their proper place.

By understanding property properly, the project aims to reposition architecture and by extension, the architect - positing architects as not merely law abiders but possibly lawmakers. The project suggests that law is how we understand objects and that we need new laws to better reflect a future that we envisage in a world that we ultimately share.