2013-2014 | Documentary & photo book on doubled-up households
PhD Candidate, School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

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Sharing has become the ultimate buzzword over the past couple of years; be it for temporary housing, car riding, tool libraries or online resources and knowledge. Sharing as a lifestyle is a way of fundamentally shifting the way you act in your everyday life and affects both you and the ones you are sharing with. It can also have great culminations on social trends and environmental behavior. Within the framework of understanding and exploring sharing practices for my personal research, I identified that sharing can have different significance to different people from diverse backgrounds, incomes, ages and ethnicities. This project intended to uncover some of the personas of people, who share a household, with the ultimate goal of creating a better understanding of their values, objectives, obstacles and habits. Moreover, their households were documented to reveal issues of spatial conflicts, privacy, communality and generosity.

The book consists of the following: personal portraits of the residents, photographic documentation of the residents’ homes, interviews of the residents with both directed questions and storytelling, results from a card playing exercise to reveal how much they share and how. The first case study was the house of Jean, Karen and Louise in Mount Lebanon, PA. They welcomed me in their home, Shadowlawn and answered all of my questions! You could read more about them and their experience through the book they coauthored or their house's website.