February 2012 Archives
The separation and isolation of the city is no accident. Along with the conceptual architectural ideas which shape a project, the structural, material, and tectonic decisions also have a hand in its overall effects. In the case of urban housing, many of the points of Modern theory as well as the structural parti play a part in its isolation. The aim of this project is to create a 'renewed correspondence' between residents, first through the removal of the corridor and also through unit configurations. This one layer of connectivity isn't enough, therefore the technical aspirations of the project are to add multiple layers of connection in its different forms to the housing block. From the volumetric interlocking organisation of flats, to the surface as a kind of connective tissue running throughout, to the intricate joinery which interlocks at a material level, this project explores the notion of connection and overlap at every scale. Through material and structural experiments, the proposal will create an inter-dependent structure where each piece is integral to the whole. In this way, the real and implied boundaries studied become interwoven and blurred throughout the project: a technical solution to reinforce the conceptual ideas.
[I think I need a bit about how the technical design affects inhabitation as well - more later.]
"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you...We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."
Don Cheadle, Crash (2004)
Life in the urban metropolis is a dichotomy of terms. On one hand, in the very nature of dense living, we accept with a certain reluctance, the interweaving of our own lives with others, a kind of involuntary collection of people, possessions, and stories. In tandem with the abrupt collision of people's lives is a rigid and ultimately isolating framework of the city. With visions of utopia, Modernism brought the grid, the unit, a machine for living which in the end results in a collection of islands, separating corridors, and boundaries.
Patrick Mauries, author and expert on Cabinets of Curiosities, speaks of the importance of not only the objects within a collection, but "with the notion of correspondence...bewteen the microcosm and the macrocosm." Like the collection of people in a city, the objects placed together add layer upon layer in a vast network of meaning.
With a framework hinging on division, separation, and isolation, the city could use a renewed correspondence bewteen the inhabitants it collects. This project will focus on the most personal, intimate, and accessible aspect of city living: the urban housing block, a microcosm of the city itself. The aim is to create a Cabinet of Curious Living, to challenge the conventional typology of the Modernist housing block, a rigid collection of cells and separators, while simultaneously coming to terms with the tendencies of western society to clearly define living space as one's own. Neither a peace and love commune nor a rigid mass with an unending corridor, the project will subtly navigate somewhere in between. By challenging, sometimes forcefully, the notion of shared space, the residents will have no choice but to collide at moments with the lives of their neighbours. By overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes revealing, the project will more aggressively collect the lives of its inhabitants in all their chaos.
