CAMPO, Worknot!, Room For Architecture and Normal Architecture. Installation view at Palazzo Bembo, 2016.

Framing the Common:
a Project on the Shared Spaces of the Apartment
Framing the Common: A Project on the Shared Spaces of the Apartment,
is a group project to shed light on the common idea of ‘home’ that started
in autumn 2014 with a workshop in Tehran. The second phase was a
parallel project involving teams from Tehran (Project Mosha, WORKNOT!),
Bogota (CAMPO), Mumbai (ROOM for Architecture), and Kuala Lumpur
(Normal Architecture) to locate the current condition of housing in the
thorough project of Modernism.
The Modern Apartment
Since its emergence, the modern home has been instrumentalized to produce
individual human-subjects, a process whose initial step was bound
with the need to provide large numbers of minimum housing for factory
workers; a process based on, but also conditioning, the separation between
workspace and lifespace, a process fundamentally rooted in quantitative
concepts of architecture, standardization, uprootedness, separation, and
individualization. On the one hand, the apartment, the modern home, is
based fundamentally on codified categorizations on the basis of functions
of each ‘unit’: bedroom, living room, kitchen, terrace, corridor, etc., and, on
the other hand, is based on modern paradigms of ownership: private as
opposed to public property. The idea of ownership was at first theorized
and put at work in the 16th century when it became a precondition for the
right of citizenship. But then it has undergone various transformations in
the way it was applied in various countries while it grew tremendously
more standardized and pixelated everywhere. The apartment as a form of
stacking separate – privately owned – living units on top of one another,
inevitably results into the creation of a series of shared spaces. These
spaces, despite living units, are owned by multiple owners – spaces such
as rooftops, terraces, staircases, elevator, patios, voids, lobbies, backyards,
corridors, emergency stairs, parking, façade, etc.. These spaces are byproducts
of the current arrangement of apartments, stacks of living units,
which are then deliberately standardized and measured to an extent that
their regulations almost define the final form of the building.
Shared Spaces of the Apartment
Today the duality between concepts of private and public – based strongly
on the modern paradigms of ownership – appears with a focus on the
individuality of human-subjects. It is in this context that shared spaces
have an in-between condition: laws and regulations consider them as in
possession of multiple owners, while their use among owners is reduced
to overly specific functions. To the extent that, instead of being spaces
owned by multiple owners, they are excluded from the possession of all – in
control of regulations. In a way, these spaces count as second-hand spaces,
spaces that are shared–not deliberately, but inevitably. These spaces,
excluded from private ownership, either turn into storage spaces, or turn
into something other than the functionality they are meant for. However,
this exclusion in itself is not a matter of our concern, but the regulations
and power relations resulting to these arrangements are our very subject
of study. These relations create the categorization of private, public, and
shared space – and at the same time dissolve ‘the common’.