Bilaal Raji Saheed

Identity & spatio-political interventions in a post-familial London

‘The stick-together families are happier by far

Than the brothers and the sisters who take separate highways are.

The gladdest people living are the wholesome folks who make

A circle at the fireside that no power but death can break.

And the finest of conventions ever held beneath the sun

Are the little family gatherings when the busy day is done.’

(The Stick-Together Families, extract of a poem from the book ‘Just Folks’ by Edgar Guest, 1917)

The nuclear family model, now in hiatus, yields to new household formations, yet new developments/councils and political rhetoric push forward the metropolitan urban-housing agenda on the still prominent ruins and legacy of this minority model. How does architecture-for-family consolidate a new multiplicity of narratives to undergo its own second demographic transition?

The project is an attempt at rendering, allegorically, the speculations and cautionary tales about new family life (by perpetuating current trends in rising extended families, non related co-habitation and a host of other forms of communal arrangements that are supplanting the older and once dominant form of the nuclear family).