Contemporary urban living is for a habitat and its occupiers not always synonymous with privacy and intimacy. The urban environment can build up into powerful intrusion onto people’s private spaces and be in opposition to a certain comfortable isolation which is essential to urban living.
My project deals with integrating a higher level of privacy and intimacy in the context of a Parisian urban block. I believe the Hausmannian design scheme of allowing for maximum light and visual exposure is not compatible with this: contemporary urban living lacks of a certain degree of ‘cocooning’ at the scale of the block in the City of Light.
My proposal isolates a given block from its immediate surroundings within the city. The conditions I wish to integrate are aimed at projecting scenarios in terms of spatial arrangements: generating privacy within the core of the structure whilst allowing for degrees of porosity to emerge by rendering the block’s envelope more heterogeneous.