Between the domestic and the urban
Transition systems as a space for collective living
Keywords:
collective housing, collective spaces, transition systems, thresholdAbstract
Public space is the structure, the spatial frame of the city (Sòla-Morales, 1997). It is the place of sharing, of collective meeting (Gehl, 1971), of democratic freedom; it is the space that sediments the urban habitat. Even so, it is in the limit space between public and private that some spatial tensions are established that shape the way we live in the city. Common housing is, on the other hand, the built matter that silently embodies the structure of the city, given the protagonism of public space (Monteys, 2013; Serpa, 2015). It is on spaces in between that current trends in architectural thought reflect on the value of spatial ambiguity as a producer of porosities that reconfigure the limits and modes of appropriation and permanence in public and private space (Monteys, 2010), recovering the conceptual memory of Nolli’s plan of Rome (1748). The transition spaces appear as a complement, on the one hand to the public space, reinterpreting theoretical reflections pointed out in the Modern Movement and by the Team 10 group in the 1960s (Hetzberger, 1991), on the other hand to the private space, as an extension of the house, redefining the limits of domesticity (PLOT 50, 2019).
The article therefore seeks to reflect on the relevance of transition spaces in collective housing buildings and how they can contribute to the construction of systems of spatial continuity between the urban and the domestic. Taking Portugal as a framework and the cases developed in research projects such as “Building Typology” and “Between Housing and the City”, it is intended to morphologically decompose the permanence and distribution systems (Boettger, 2014) of residential buildings, interpreting them as a thick threshold where one inhabits (Van Eyck, 1962). The aim is to open the debate in architectural production on the importance of these systems as transition devices, but also as articulation structures and expansion of public (Schmid, 2019) and domestic space that activate the habitat, making it more integrated and continuous.
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