Moving Houses Part 2 Dissertation 2025 Chidinma Oligbo Royal College of Art | UK 'Moving Houses' is a reflective and autoethnographic exploration of how the logic and ethos of the Nigerian compound house are made manifest in the diasporic experiences of African specifically Nigerian migrants. Drawing on the lived experiences of the author, a Nigerian student in the UK, and her aunt, a long-settled nurse, the work interrogates how communal spatial traditions rooted in openness, interdependence, and collective care are reimagined in Western domestic settings often marked by isolation and privacy.Blending storytelling with architectural theory, the project traces a journey through student dorms, rented flats, and studio spaces, revealing how memory, culture, and identity transform everyday architecture. It positions the compound house not as a nostalgic relic but as a resilient, relational logic a cultural blueprint that migrates with the body, resisting spatial individualism.Moving Houses challenges dominant Western housing models and asks how architecture might better reflect hybrid identities and collective ways of living. It is both a critical and creative act: a reclamation of space through narrative, design thinking, and cultural continuity.In doing so, it offers architects a powerful, personal, and deeply relevant lens through which to rethink home, belonging, and spatial justice in an increasingly globalised world. Tutor(s) Emilio Distretti