Housing Without Rooms: An Architecture of Objects

Today’s housing models suffocate their inhabitants. While the free plan has reduced architecture to its bare essence, its logic has been undermined by utilizing free space to fit a maximum number of rooms possible. This has come at a great cost to people – socially, architecturally, psychologically. Each housing unit is an individualized cell, completely severed from any other through walls. Consequently, neighbouring units rarely interact. Communality, once an integral part of inhabiting almost any space, is now vainly achieved in the limited offerings of circulation and amenity spaces, carefully entwined within the optimized stacking of units. Occupants and visitors must navigate these cavernous mazes through a series of secured checkpoints – concierges, security, elevators, card-accessed areas – reinforcing isolationism. A new way is possible: a move away from the enclosure and containment of rooms to the freedom of transient objects that can accompany and enrich us.