Berenice Martin

Transformation is the new condition of architecture.

Today, with the development of new technologies, the future of architecture depends on its capacity to be transformed. Given the condition of our fluid modern society with its rapid change, it seems that designing less specific and more simple organisations would make sense.

The project’s ambition is to design a new FORM of living environment based on the concept of ambiguity.

A modular space that changes in shape, finding its modularity in the multitude of possible interpretations it provides rather than literal flexibility.

Ambiguity leads to different interpretations, it offers a language, as though objects were like words, instead of behavioural settings. It creates a new spatial language, which leads to not only to providing different interpretations and the possibility for different users to appropriate the space, but also new aesthetics. 

There are two levels of ambiguity explored throughout the scheme, the ambiguity of the object and the ambiguity of the space. 

The proposed model is a house scattered over the landscape in the countryside.

The idea is to map out and territorialise domestic space with very few indicators; creating a landscape on which a series of objects and programs sit.

The project is designed as a landscape to discover.

It is a series of physically disconnected rooms that act as comfortable objects; fragments in the landscape that form a strong connection with each other as a whole. The layout is such that each room has a different spatial quality, and where the overall spatial sequence can be recognised as one entity.

Rather than following a conventional checklist of amenities (The kitchen, the bathroom,…), that one would expect from a typical dwelling, the aim is to master more sensory and metaphysical properties, such as light, volumes, climate, spatiality. To allow for a more diverse pattern of domestic life, rooms are undefined in their use, giving little distinction to how spaces should be inhabited.

Each location is conceived as an hybrid space; a succession of rooms with no names. The focus is on how space could be appropriated. In an ambiguous attitude towards the object and space, the aim is to remodel the environment with small shifts in design which may have a considerable impact on perception and subsequently on behaviour. Elements are designed to lead to a more flexible pattern of use and arrangement.

The project’s scope is a succession of known forms with altered meanings due to their ambiguous shape or their unexpected juxtaposition with each other. 

The idea is to inhabit a house that never was..