Concept taken from Agnieszka Stepien and Lorenzo Barnó: “¿Están nuestras casas preparadas para el #yomequedoencasa provocado por el coronavirus?”, accessible at Stepienybarno (March 2020).
Example taken from Elizabeth Fazzare: “How Four Creatives Are Reinventing Their Spaces to WFH”, accessible at Architectural Digest (March 2020).
3 minutos
CO-dwelling 2020: a story about the transformation of living space. Drawing by author, 2020.Juan has been living in his flat for 63 days. That might have seemed an obvious thing to say a few months ago, but over the last few weeks it’s come to describe a totally unprecedented situation. Juan’s habitual, routine activities no longer take place in different places but are all crowded into one single space: the flat he shares with his family. Like half of the world’s population, Juan can’t go out. The time he used to take to get to his place of work has decreased drastically from 10 hours a week to the few seconds needed to walk into the next room.1 Conversations and meetings with his friends have been substituted by an 18 x 10 inch window which now connects him to the real world. As does the balcony, a space up until now ignored in most homes and in many of them eliminated altogether in a mad desire to increase the dwelling’s interior floor area. What wouldn’t they give to be able to turn the clock back now!
Almost every day, Juan’s flat becomes thousands of different places to accommodate 5 people’s lives 24/7.
The living room is Juan’s office during working hours, a yoga room and gym in the evening, and a cinema that Juan visits with his father at weekends.
The flat’s main corridor, previously a distribution space communicating the rooms, has temporarily become a street where Juan’s grandfather can go for a walk 2-3 times a day.
The room belonging to Juan and his brother has one bed. Or two, depending on the time of day. It’s also got one table. Or two. In the morning it becomes an office, and in the afternoon it’s a craft and lettering workshop with a trunk for a work surface and a cushion on the floor to sit on. They say that’s a relaxing position to sit in. Sometimes the flat becomes a pub full of friends, close in spirit even though they’re far away.
Lockdown has forced Juan and his family almost unconsciously to transform the domestic space they inhabit. It’s also fomented the emergence of a new concept: that of the dwelling space as a process, as the sum total of all its users’ decisions and desires. It’s a transformation of the home – a concept forced on us as a repetitive, cut-and-dried consumer product – through the objects and domestic actions of its inhabitants. It’s Juan’s desires and needs that shape the dwelling space. He may choose to become a chef or a hairdresser for a few hours, or cultivate his interest in cinema, or turn a room into a photography studio2 or a gym…<0}
Residential architecture should make it possible for our environment to be transformed, to be adapted to our needs. It should not – as has been the case for some time now – expect us to adapt ourselves to spaces that are the result of a repetitive, definitive, building philosophy aimed at creating dense cities that don’t reflect the humanity of those who inhabit their dwellings. Perhaps this lockdown period has made us reconsider the place where we live, and transform it – albeit ever so slightly – into a place we actually want. And it’s demonstrated something that’s been evident to many of us for many years: residential architecture needs a rethink. Or two.
Concept taken from Agnieszka Stepien and Lorenzo Barnó: “¿Están nuestras casas preparadas para el #yomequedoencasa provocado por el coronavirus?”, accessible at Stepienybarno (March 2020).
Example taken from Elizabeth Fazzare: “How Four Creatives Are Reinventing Their Spaces to WFH”, accessible at Architectural Digest (March 2020).
