There is modern craving within human nature for privacy, which we have been conditioned to expect, our homes have become the cocoon that enables us this privacy.
“Following the removal of the workplace from the home as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation, the household was recast as the family’s private retreat, and home emerged as a new concept and existence.”[1]
This privacy within dwellings was a removal from the way in which we as a culture had lived previously. In our modern world ‘home’ has become removed from community, a private, secluded and separate space for inhabitation. This idea of privacy within our lives has been given a physical manifestation through the architecture that is used to build these private dwellings around us. Working to seclude dwelling from the more public spaces outside rather than working to include them into the fabric of our everyday inhabitation.
To oppose this idea of seclusion and privacy which has been conditioned into our modern-day dwelling; a blurring of boundaries, gradual or jarring, must be instigated. Allowing the collision between the public and private aspects of life to be flexible, malleable and self-defining. This brief aims to pose the question: “how much privacy is too much?” The prescribed architectural qualities of the collision between public and private moments (and the blurring of boundaries between these moments) achieve a re-balance of the human experience. Inviting one into the other.
Chance interactions and cohabitation challenge the idea of the home as an individual’s private dwelling and the architecture aims to direct and enable such moments. Ever evolving and co-dependent, the human experience of ‘home’ invites community and connection back into the home.
[1] Colbeck, The Home as a Social Construct – Escaping the Country.
Final presentation model
Detail model of critical junction
Preliminary Concept Work
Exploring the meaning of the word Interval
