Caroline Bang

HUMAN-KIN is a proposal for a visionary home in London for kinship families. My goal for the project is to design a collective home that embodies different ways of living responding to a future in which the nuclear family is no longer the norm, and which therefore also spatially breaks away from the traditional configurations of domestic space.

The three LGBTQIA+ housing associations TONIC Housing, Stonewall Housing and Opening Doors London have recently joined forces to research the well-beings of the +55-year-olds within the LGBTQIA+ community in London. This is recognised as a group which feels particularly isolated, overlooked and not belonging in regular society. In response to this research, I have designed housing for this particular group of people with the aim of bringing them closer together as a community and kinship family but also to make them visible and part of the city fabric.

Living through a pandemic dramatically emphasizes our human needs and desires for kinship and togetherness which are as crucially important to respond to as to rational requirements. HUMAN-KIN is therefore not a hyper-optimized co-living institution, but a collective home that embodies different ways of living responding to a future in which the nuclear family is no longer the norm.

The site for my project is a tunnel-opening behind a Georgian ghost façade in Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, London. So, HUMAN-KIN is also to be seen as a response to a Dysfunctional housing market in London which the pandemic has further exposed. We need to rethink, reuse and update already existing buildings and unused sites and make more useful domestic spaces for the 21st century and beyond.

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Caroline Bang