2025 ACSA/AIA Intersections Research Conference:
NEW HOUSING PARADIGMS

Housing is a process, a product, and a place. As such, it involves a multitude of actors and constituents, disciplines, and professions. As a process, it is a political as much as an economic one, it is top-down as much as bottom-up, and it involves flows of data and capital as much as flows of materials and labor. As product it can be classified into architectural typologies and analyzed as urban morphology, it is a physical commodity, and it accounts for a significant percentage of our global carbon emissions. As a place, it determines what our cities look like, how we inhabit them, and how we live together and form communities.

While for some time now, it has become apparent that customary processes of housing production have reached an impasse, proposed remedies are as diverse as the actors involved and tend to echo the biases of specialized expertise and reinforce existing disciplinary paradigms (“faster & cheaper,” “less & better,” “more regulation,” “less regulation,” “more technology,” “more bottom-up,” “more top-down,” “new typologies,” “old typologies,” etc…).

As housing finds itself at the center of overlapping crises of affordability, climate change, policy, and design, there is an urgent need for a shift away from entrenched paradigms towards larger conversations, and new forms of synthetic collaborative practices. More than a decade into the crisis, can we identify outlines of emerging paradigm shifts? How do architects take ownership of these conversations – as leaders or as contributors – and what are their roles in future housing practices?

The 2025 ACSA/AIA Intersections Research Conference invites contributions, papers, projects, case studies, and critical observations that speculate on, advocate for, operate within, and struggle with new housing paradigms. Innovative approaches are welcome at all scales, from single unit to master plan as we recognize even the smallest unit of private space to inherently be an urban problem. Contributions should relate to one of the tracks listed below or address potential overlaps between no more than two.

Housing for Equitable Communities
Contributions that engage with, leverage, or invent political or economic processes and outcomes that positively impact affordability, communities, equity, or intervene at a larger scale of urban design or urbanism.

Housing as Radical Solution
Solutions that radically rethink housing, its constituent parts (material, space, typology), its effects, representations, or its genesis to generate alternative visions or productive critiques or engage with the long lineage of utopian and/or dystopian visions for ways we live.

Housing as Pedagogy
Contributions that interrogate the way we teach future generations of architects, educate constituents, and disseminate information to leverage talent and skill towards the goal of better housing.

Housing for Ecology
Contributions that recognize the inherent roles of housing in preserving, strengthening, and creating ecosystems, or reducing greenhouse gases.

Housing for Well-being + Health
Contributions that focus on health inequalities, cater to specific vulnerabilities and needs, and capabilities of housing to positively impact its (urban) environments, or human interactions therein.