Studio tutor: Line Fontana (Fagart & Fontana)

Assistant: Paule Perron (minor)

De l’intime à l’extime addresses the possibility of a domestic territory in dialogue with constantly changing and accelerating contemporary lifestyles in the specific context of student housing. This studio takes note of the profound spatial inequalities encountered by students during repeated lockdowns, in order to explore the projectual alternatives opening up the possibility of a home.

Although student profiles have evolved drastically since the first European campuses, the housing intended for them still revolves around the same architectural organisation, combining a succession of identical living units with distribution corridors and a few areas to gather and socialise. The transformation of the private sphere confronted with the increased risk of the intrusion of social and rhythmic pressures – reinforced since the repeated lockdowns – deserves to nourish reflection/experimentation on the material qualities that allow or prevent access to contemporary, variable, unstable, and subjective comfort.

From privacy to the public, domestic space is divided into programmatically structured transitional thresholds anchored in our habitus. Protecting the private sphere and allowing for a gradation of intimacy sectorised from the bedroom to the street via the living room or the corridor, these places respond to – and perpetuate – Western social norms of living together that one must look at not as a prerequisite to thinking about housing, but as a variable to be questioned. Any norm, whether social, dimensional or constructive, defines a boundary of acceptability that enables us to live together, but also carries a social hierarchy that necessarily excludes those whose bodies or attributes do not correspond to this normative corpus. The aim is therefore to perpetually question them.