Project Statement

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.