This project looks into and builds on the potential of the relationships revealed between the alteration of physical space and the enabled human interactions, digging into those that inevitably occur with the closest, our neighbors, and within the most common urban habitat, the residential block.
When repositioning domestic space and communal structures at the center of the social debate through architecture, this proposal leverages the growing and transformative power of non-regulated collective action and bottom-up initiatives to subvert the current real estate logics and envision alternative futures for our domestic aggregations. In addition, and since almost 75% of the housing of tomorrow is already built today, it also draws attention to the need to adapt our current models to the social challenges to come, reflecting on the (political) role of architects in facilitating processes of self-determination and co-production of space.
So, in order to stress the theoretical implications and design possibilities of working with the existing, this spatial simulation arises as an opportunity to question our relationship with the physical environments that structure our coexistence. Advocating for small everyday insurrections will, furthermore, help us to move from wondering what Architecture can do for us to reflect on what we can do with the architectures we have been given.
This proposal constitutes a speculative simulacrum of subversive modes of coexistence that would enable the implementation of soft forms of activism that every resident might put into practice through the opening of punctual passages between the prevailing segregated units. Based on replicable and rhizomatic strategies, it sets the ground for a new decentralized domesticity best suited to accommodate emerging and diverse typologies of post-familial living arrangements and various forms of collectives. It relies on a molecular way of expansion that allows participants to react to evolving circumstances altering those thin surfaces (walls, floors, ceilings) that tie us together while keeping us apart, and questioning at the same time preconceived ideas about privacy and ownership. In an idealized theoretical construct, inhabitants will be able to co-produce new interlocked interiors, now understood as informal continuums, and upgrade existing residential buildings, finally perceived as a sequence of cohabitation clusters, as constellations of new intimacies.

This proposal delves into the heterogeneity of households and proves the multiplicity of domestic meanings with the aim of producing useful and operative knowledge related to a wide range of issues affecting communities and urban systems. It emerges as an invitation to reflect on how we might otherwise imagine and inhabit our inherited domestic spaces, and how we come together beyond the effects of the COVID-19 global health crisis, when new forms of solidarity and care should arise and be exercised. It might then be possible to overcome social constraints and rediscover neglected relational needs and values, envisioning other forms of urban coexistence.