Philip Johnson once said that “all architecture is shelter, but all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the people in that space.” Similar to art, architecture has the ability to detach the individual, and provoke a sense of intrigue and inspiration.
Maisons Stationnaires is a housing project, freed from the traditional developer’s mind. The housing block presents a creative way of living where the mind is activated through elements of surprise, while carving out spaces of retreat and introspection. By reimagining some of the most common traits of housing blocks (ei, the entrance, the shared circulation, gardens and the genericness), Maisons Stationnaires questions both the appearances and the operations of how we could live today.
THE HOME AS SPACE OF ACTION,
THE EVERYDAY AS CREATIVE PRODUCTION
The idea of home is connected to our private interiors. It’s where we project our values and beliefs onto space, by intuitively selecting the things we surround ourselves with. Vice versa, the way we design our homes co-constructs our stories and behaviours. The home is thus a constant flux of receiving and projecting, an active space, where there is room for experiment and creative production.
For decades, artists have used their homes beyond the expected. Their domesticity is built via a culture of objects, which revolutionise a daily routine that is increasingly based on different proportions between work-time and leisure-time. Maisons Stationnaires proposes a similar concept to living. The house feels naked, similar to a blank canvas, and invites to behave disruptively, to be imaginative, and to add new meaning.
THE HIDDEN POWER OF UNPREDICTABILITY
AND THE SURPRISE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Architect Arrol Gellner wrote that “The essence of beauty is a pattern containing fluctuations. In other words, the human mind likes to have a handle on the overall aesthetic pattern, but it also longs to be challenged by unexpected changes in that pattern; The element of surprise”. Maisons Stationnaires includes a series of odd, unexpected spaces and elements, including a lack of corridors. Moments where the pattern is not broken, but interpreted differently —a small deviation that wakes us up from routine, activates the senses, and challenges the view.
Part of this play is the coexistence of two parallel lives, which exist inside the same volume. Their eyes observe the same spaces, the same trees, they share one same experience even though both form part of two completely different private worlds —as demonstrated by the two seperate entrance doors. Maisons Stationnaires is a subtle play of seeing and not seeing, a distant meeting of strangers gazing towards the same point. The housing block presents a sense of togetherness without it being explicit, challenging how an apartment building fundamentally operates.
CONTEMPLATIVE SPACES: INVITING TO OBSERVE AND TO CONTEMPLATE
If architecture is only directed towards surprise and activation, it can lose its impact as inhabitants are left without room to process the challenge. Maisons Stationnaires is a challenging living space, yet it is also capable of being silent, by carving out spaces for tranquility and contemplation.
Incorporating a second, permeable facade, Maisons Stationnaires takes its distance from the public street, while creating a natural layer of privacy in the form of a contemplative patio designed to be observed, rather than used, both for the inhabitants and passerbys. The double facade is an ownerless void, and a counterintuitive way to respect the surroundings. Private life is not pushed to its limit, but takes a distance from the public, allowing it to exist without being invasive. Natural light comes in through layers, and flows from the outside to the most intimate places of the home.
OBSOLETE LUXURY: ARCHITECTURE THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS
In a primitive sense, our home signifies safety, protection, privacy —a place where we can retreat from the world. But in the words of French philosopher Marc Antoine Laugier, the idea of “primitive” is also connected to a return to origins, in which architectural form embodies what is natural and intrinsic. In other words, Laugier proposes an architecture of obsolete luxury, freed from all the superfluous, which is what we believe to be the basis for architecture that moves us.
Maisons Stationnaires is exactly what it is. It’s an honest building, both in form and material. Its rhythm is complex, composed by a repetition of cubes which perforate the volume, and create a dichotomy between emptiness and fullness. The cubes are static, the functional nuclei of the home, while the empty spaces around them have no name, no definition. Maisons Stationnaires’ living spaces are fluid, flexible, free —a place where anything can happen.
