There once was an architectural dream called housing, which placed architecture at the center of an expansive effort to reimagine existing ways of life. Housing was, during its most radical period in the mid-twentieth century, the first legitimate architectural counterculture. Today, all of the historical conditions that once made Housing a viable architectural movement have been swept away and replaced by something else. Socialism and liberalism have given way to neoliberalism; the state has been swallowed by real estate; communication has been replaced by information; sociality by interactivity; metropolitan anonymity by electronically mediated privacy. Under Present Conditions documents a series of extended investigations, texts, and design speculations produced in recent years by our practice, MILLIØNS. Together, these projects revitalize the experimental spirit of modernist housing by reimagining its primary typological inventions against the complex technical and political background of contemporary neoliberal urbanism.

Zeina Koreitem is founding partner in MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice, Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and visiting design faculty at SCI-Arc. Her practice's work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and their essays and interviews are widely published, including a recent catalog of work on experimental collective living published by MIT's SA+P Press (2015). Koreitem is a licensed architect in Lebanon, and has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Toronto. Prior to founding MILLIØNS, she worked in the offices of Dominique Perrault Architecture and RCR Arquitectes. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut, where she received the AREEN Project Award of Excellence in Architecture, an MArchII from the University of Toronto, and an MDes in Design Computation from Harvard GSD, where she received the Daniel L. Shodek Award for Technology.

John May is founding partner in MILLIØNS, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where he also serves as Director of the Master’s in Design Studies program. May's essays and interviews have appeared in numerous books and journals, and the work of his design practice has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Architecture and Design Museum, and Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles, Museum of the City of New York, Harvard GSD, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Keller Gallery. May previously served as a visiting professor at MIT, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), SCI-Arc, and at Rice University, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD, and a doctorate in Geography and Environmental Studies from UCLA.