ROOM WITHOUT PROGRAM

London Underground WWII

If we think about it, there might be infinite possibilities in considering how mankind and space interact. Industrialization and mass-production has forced us to reduce these infinite possibilities into a list of rooms, a standardized set of interactions that the industry could design and respond to. Our homes have become nests, spaces perfectly adapted to specific functions. When designing an apartment or a house, the function has become a static notion: each space responds to a one of the specific activities that mass-industry has catalogued under the category of “home”. In some way, we are all actors in the Truman Show with a cozy plateau designed by IKEA. Intuition is killed, preconception imposed.

However, what about all the other interactions that IKEA is not taking into account? What about all those domestic interactions with space that industrialization has never grasped to systematize and to domesticate into its production chain? These are the kind of relations that I find interesting to explore. If the idea of the nest is a space made according to standard functions, then I am interested in the idea of a cave. In a cave, function is dynamic, not a static concept. Space is not made according to functions but humans, when inhabiting it, gradually begin to assimilate and appropriate its spaces in an intuitive manner. Its geomorphology offers certain spatial conditions that awake human intuition: depressions, changes of height, alcoves, darkness…every spatial feature becomes an opportunity. In a cave, function is dynamic; we humans can continue to learn how to inhabit spaces and change the preconceptions.

So the question here is, how to design artificial caves? How to provide maximal spatial difference inside an apartment? How to avoid homogeneous conditions? It might be helpful to get rid of the notion of “room”. Words as bedroom, kitchen, bathroom or living room are just limits to our imagination. It is not coincidence that some of these spaces, such as bed-room, are named depending on the kind of industrial product they are thought from. I don’t know when the name sleeping-room (still referred to an activity) was changed to bed-room, but I just wonder when spaces such as the bath-room or living-room might become the wc-room and the sofa-room if globalization succeeds in imposing particular practices. As architects, I prefer to think about how the sleeping-room might become the living-room when the living-room becomes the washing-room.