Studio

Program and Heritage: Occupé à habiter

Geneva, January 2019

The Studio Program and Heritage focuses on architectural intervention in the existing housing structure. This semester, under the title “Occupé à habiter” (Busy to live), students analyzed a particular case of living together, namely squats between 1980 and 2010 in Geneva. By crossing historical archives and artistic glances, they have restored and reinterpreted squats’ interior spaces. Their approach allowed them to highlight the architectural features of the appropriation of an interior heritage.

Political and social dimensions of the squat movement in Geneva have been largely analyzed, but the studio focuses this semester on a dimension still little studied by the architects: the spatial appropriation. Through a fight against the standardization of housing in the city, squats have questioned the devices and equipment of the collective community housing: new typologies for new ways of life. Designed for “ordinary” families, squatted housing has been transformed and adapted to meet the needs of new occupants.

How to adapt an architecture corresponding to the modes of living of past times? How to appropriate the interior space of an apartment? How to make individualism and community coexist? How to restructure and materialize the limits between intimacy and extimacy? How to take care of living? So many questions that will accompany the study of the studio.

TEAM

Studio tutor : Line Fontana
Assistant : Thierry Buache

Students :
BA Interior Architecture
Christine Demierre, Roméo Drege, Marine Evrard, Cloé Gyssler, Loula Hesse, Thibault Krauer, Timéa Schmidt, Clara Souche, Sonia Vetsch, Livia Wagner

Head of Department : Dr. Javier Fernández Contreras
Scientific Deputy : Valentina De Luigi

Photo Credits
© HEAD – Genève, Baptiste Coulon

Occupé à habiter
Atelier Line Fontana, HEAD–AI’ID, 2018-2019