Unreal Estate is the title of my Final Study project for Texas A&M University. The Final Study is a year long project (essentially a design thesis) that is largely driven by the students themselves, culminating in a finished building design and a printed book authored by each student. For my own project, the subject of alternative (or perhaps speculative) housing was chosen as the subject of my study. At the forefront of an AI revolution, I thought it apt to design housing with new tools and technologies that I was unfamiliar with. After some experimentation and preliminary design work, the project ended up as an attempt to build a system of design from scratch, not unlike Habitat 67, which is probably the most famous thesis project and one that most people are familiar with. The system of design is detailed in the book; put simply, the system of design uses parametric scripting via Grasshopper, prefabrication via CLT, 3D printing, a simple interior module, and simple structural details. The project, ambitious in its scope, ended up being a not-too-useful system, though it was extremely successful in teaching me about a lot of different and difficult things in architecture and housing. Although the system I created will not solve the housing crisis in any capacity, it is a genuine, novel critique of the state of housing in the architecture profession today, and can be repeated ad infinitum in a variety of contexts.
The project is broken up into several parts down below. If you are interested, the full version of the book I published as part of my thesis is also available and is the best representation of the project.