Shaping our Environment

IAAC [international competition]
Cooperation with: Vasiliki Mavrogianni

Nowadays, the meaning of “home” has lost its initial determination. The whole idea of residence has been demolished. Its use has been limited to meeting basic needs, such as sleeping. All this energy has been trapped in the city. The city has captured our activities and, along with them, our lives. Our whole program of everyday life is being formed by the city. The fast pace of life dictates when we should do what and most of all, when we should return home. Our lives have been transferred outside house borders. We act and live inside the city, turning it into our own houses. So, all the “inside activities” have become a part of the “outside life”, since the limits of residence are fluid. Therefore, we observe a sort of division of residence; division regarding the activities, which can be met either as a single activity or several of them  together. 

Taking into consideration that the majority of us spend our time moving from one part of the city to another, in order to do our jobs, we can actually see this whole system of transportation as an extended version of our homes. We could consider the mode of transportation to be the corridor of our homes; a place we can use to transfer ourselves from one part of the house to another, or more generally, from one activity to another. Hence, since the corridor is the link between the activities inside a home, the mode of transportation is the link between activities in the entire city. In addition to that, each station is considered to be different status, a point in the city where different actions take place, a similar to our home’s different rooms. 

In our case, we consider that mode of transportation to be the metro.  
Our  aim is to create units which are going to serve transient residential needs of people who live in the big cities. These units are going to be autonomous spatial systems, without excluding the possibility of association with the aim of creating a totality. They are going to be placed in indicative metro stations and serve basic needs, such as relaxation, sleep, cook…

We note the existence of a dipole. On the one hand, there is the transport mode, the metro, which through the followed paths serves the speed of life. On the other, there are the stations, the temporary consolidation of fast pace of life; two fundamental different conditions that coexist in the same place.