Studio tutor: Line Fontana (Fagart & Fontana Architectes)

Assistant: Paule Perron.

“The home is no longer just a place of rest and individual and family privacy. It is activated by new functions which are part of the spheres of work, leisure and consumption and which contribute to putting it under temporal pressure”. This is the initial observation proposed by Domotopia, an SNSF research project in partnership with EPFL LaSUR x HEAD, to which students will contribute this semester. They will explore the disciplinary crossroads between sociology and interior architecture to question the contemporaneity of Geneva’s housing.

Through a series of interviews with the residents of the Cité Vieusseux – residential blocks designed by the Honegger brothers, built between 1968 and 1990 – the students highlight the reciprocal impact between residents and their domestic space. They first transcribe the interview graphically, then analyse the spatial arrangements of the housing visited. Finally, they question their capacity to absorb and adapt to the transformations of our rhythms of life.

Through a series of spatial experiments, the students define the domestic space according to three periods in the life of its inhabitants, offering transcalary, scalable devices capable of adapting to the specificities of the household concerned.