Apartment unit for four equal friends

Communal living in our times is being defined by the life style of young professional who group together in a domestic setting. Friendship itself, is become a strategy for survival in an increasingly competitive and rapid changing world. For this reason, and other economic factors, more young people today are choosing to live in the company of each other. Friendship therefore becomes a replacement for the despotic family, in a generation that is subject to much social-politic reinterpretations concerning life and the process of living. The principle ofequality is another resurrected political ideology that is increasingly relevant in my generation therefore, it figures largely in our relationship towards each other. The architecture that envelopes these like minds, should both reflect and service the principles of friendship shared in common. The inhabitants of the apartment share a duality of living socialization that moves from public to private and vice versa. The completely commonly shared spaces (dining and living) are located at the hearth of unit with the private spaces (bedrooms and bathrooms) splitting from the center. The bedrooms have the capability of being opened up to become incorporated into the central public space. The idea is Palladian in form, recalling the infinite view point that moves the eye from room to rooms via door-openings into the landscape beyond. The bedroom doors are rolled away and pocketed within the wall when the residents choose to transform the whole apartment into a large common space. Such social gathering allowing visual access into each other’s private spaces can only be imagined in the minds of contemporary generations. This circulation and programmatic scheme, reflects the diminishing importance of privacy in or time when all things are becoming public knowledge by the use of technology. The idea of passing through someone’s bedroom in order to access another room is not new in architecture. Indeed it is found in other cultures apart from the US and time periods prior to the modern age. In the case of the apartment unit, the Landscape view becomes the desired access that can only be experienced be looking across the bedroom from the central space. Since both nature and the living hearth are common to all men, the bedroom becomes the only place left for privacy, acting as the mediator between the natural world and manmade artifice.