Inhabiting Machine
Ex nihilo, 2024
Microhabitat 25 m²
Concours pour Buildner
Inhabiting machine
The building is a machine that you inhabit but it is also a machine that makes life grow and thrive within it.
Playing around the different floors and terraces, the house invites people to move around and explore spaces, perspectives and uses, finding an enriched human daily experience by inhabiting space with other living beings.
Modulating space
The project takes life through its modularity. The perception and uses of the spaces are transformed by elements coming up and down – the table, the bed, the basket going to the roof gardens – with the help of several pulley systems.
The solid brick strip housing the utilities of the home is the anchor of the more fluid spaces that evolve according to the needs and the uses of the inhabitants.
The inhabitants are connected to the present, their environment, their rythm in a home where they are fully in control of what their space and their life looks like.
Filing the gap
The project is designed to fill the gaps in existing city streets, finding solutions for urban densification within an existing framework and limiting urban sprawling. It encourages to think the city on, through and around the existing urban fabric, living off-grid in a city grid. The design allows the front garden to become an active threshold. It becomes part of the street and offers the possibility of opening the home to the neighbourhood in the summer days, without compromising the intimacy of its inhabitants.
Sustainability
Frugality was a key concept throughout the conception of the project. The design ensures the comfort of its inhabitants while limiting energy needs as much as possible. The storage and distribution of electricity and water relies on gravity and it becomes integral to the architecture itself, allowing elements that are usually hidden to become part of the aesthetic of the design.
The project respects the gaps that it inhabits and its preexisting ecosystem, welcoming insects, birds and other small animals that need refuge in cities and making sure most of the footprint of the house is covered by planted surfaces.
Entre les briques et le pisé,
Entre le bois et les faces vitrées,
Dans un creux de ville,
Une machine à habiter.
Des plans horizontaux montent et descendent :
Le lit, la table, le panier.
Les pans verticaux s’ouvrent et se ferment,
Deviennent casquette pliée.
Un escalier pour contempler, monter,
Sur les briques posées.
La verdure et la végétation se cultivent,
S’auto-approprient les espaces d’ici.
Le vivant reprend sa place
Et l’habitant, résiliant,
Vit au rythme de son environnement
Qu’il accommode à son besoin,
Pour prendre soin.