what we learned: modes of habitation

WHAT KIND OF WORLD DO WE REHEARSE AT HOME?

When Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou opened MODES OF HABITATION, she asked, ‘what if the home is where we first rehearse the world we want, in miniature, before we dare to build it?’ Over the weeks that followed, that question kept expanding. The home appeared less as a finished object than as a testing ground: for comfort and discomfort, solitude and community, permanence and change, efficiency and pleasure. Again and again, the spaces we inhabit revealed themselves as active participants in everyday life, shaping how we move, work, rest, meet others and understand what belongs to us.

As the chapter moved from kitchens and conversation pits to underground houses, residential towers and entire cities, another idea became increasingly difficult to ignore. Habitation is never only about the four walls around us. It extends into the landscape, the infrastructure outside the front door, the species sharing our buildings, and the economic forces determining who gets to stay in a place at all. Here is what MODES OF HABITATION taught us.

Site of Reversible Destiny, Critical Resemblance House, Yoro Park, Japan, 1993-95 | image via Reversible Destiny Foundation

COMFORT IS NOT ALWAYS THE GOAL

Few projects challenged our assumptions about domestic comfort as directly as the architecture of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Their Bioscleave House turns the floor into uneven terrain, lowers the kitchen into the center of the room and places poles throughout the interior to help occupants regain their balance. The pair believed that a home should prevent the body from slipping into habit, keeping its inhabitants alert through continuous physical negotiation with their surroundings. Their claim that such architecture might even extend life was intentionally extreme, but the question underneath it remains provocative: if comfort makes architecture disappear from our awareness, what happens when the home refuses to let us stop noticing it?

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky approached the body from almost the opposite direction. Her Frankfurt Kitchen, developed for the Neues Frankfurt housing program in the 1920s, was designed to make domestic labor as efficient as possible. Every movement between stove, sink, cabinets and work surfaces was considered, turning the compact kitchen into something closer to a laboratory. Its rationalization would later attract criticism for reinforcing the idea of the woman in the kitchen, although Schütte-Lihotzky’s intention was precisely to reduce the time women spent on housework. A century later, the kitchen remains a reminder that even the smallest domestic plan can contain much larger assumptions about work, gender, time and freedom.

Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates (Tokyo, est. 1962). Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo. 1970–72. exterior view. 1972 | image by Tomio Ohashi

A HOME SHOULD BE ABLE TO CHANGE

Kisho Kurokawa imagined the Nakagin Capsule Tower as architecture capable of aging differently. Its 140 prefabricated capsules were attached to permanent concrete cores with the expectation that individual units could eventually be removed and replaced as technology and lifestyles changed. They never were. Ownership structures, maintenance, construction logistics and deteriorating infrastructure made a building conceived around transformation unexpectedly resistant to it, and the tower was dismantled in 2022. Nakagin’s story complicated one of architecture’s favorite promises: modularity does not automatically produce adaptability. A home can only change when the technical, economic and social systems around it are capable of changing too.

At the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, temporariness takes on a quieter form. Nine cabins by architects including Kengo Kuma & Associates, ELEMENTAL, Studio MK27 and Rintala Eggertsson offer writers and translators homes for residencies lasting from a few weeks to several months. Each responds differently to the relationship between living and working: some stack functions vertically, others separate concentration from everyday routines, while ELEMENTAL adds a communal space for cooking and gathering. Together, they form a small experimental neighborhood where retreat does not necessarily mean isolation. Perhaps temporary housing can be highly specific precisely because it does not need to anticipate an entire lifetime.

wood provides the starting point | image by Leo Fabrizio

LIVING TOGETHER NEEDS ROOM TO HAPPEN

Supaform’s Transit Encounters brought the conversation pit back without literally digging a hole in the floor. Maxim Shcherbakov’s large green seating landscape at Alcova extends the sofa beyond the limits of a conventional object, offering different heights and positions for sitting, lounging, listening and gathering around a central turntable. What became interesting was not simply its retro reference but how quickly people began negotiating the object together. At first visitors hesitated to enter; once one person did, others followed. The project reminded us that furniture can organize social behavior without prescribing it completely. Sometimes connection begins with something as simple as giving people a reason to sit differently.

That distinction between creating community and merely creating the conditions for it also runs through HOUSING — 33 Answers to the Housing Question. In conversation with designboom, editor Laura Traub described housing as something that must respond to lives increasingly defined by changing families, work patterns, care structures and stages of life. The projects gathered in the book reject the idea of a single housing solution, moving instead through cooperative models, shared spaces, adaptive reuse and renovation. Crucially, architecture cannot manufacture social relationships simply by inserting a communal room. It can, however, make different forms of everyday life easier to imagine — while still leaving room for privacy, retreat and change.

THE HOUSE HAS MORE THAN HUMAN RESIDENTS

Looking beyond human occupation widened the meaning of habitation considerably. At ChartierDalix’s School of Science and Biodiversity, cavities, ledges and irregularities were designed directly into the concrete envelope so vegetation, birds and insects could settle there; more than a decade later, hundreds of plant and animal species have been recorded around the building. Other projects extend the same idea through birdhouses, nesting cavities, reconstructed ecosystems and wildlife corridors. These are not simply green buildings. Their architecture physically changes because another species has been included in the brief. The wall stops being a boundary built exclusively to keep nature outside and becomes somewhere else to live.

Going underground, meanwhile, revealed how dependent the home remains on the world beyond it. From China’s centuries-old dikengyuan courtyard dwellings to contemporary houses buried into hillsides, subterranean architecture can use the earth itself as enclosure and thermal mass. Yet the most compelling examples repeatedly cut their way back toward daylight, air, landscape and the horizon. Courtyards bring pieces of sky below ground; glazed openings project views outward; buried gardens make orientation possible again. The contradiction is revealing. A home can disappear almost completely into the earth, but our sense of inhabiting it still depends on maintaining some relationship with what lies outside.

Reggio School Madrid, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Spain, 2022 | image © José Hevia

LANDSCAPE CAN BECOME PART OF THE PLAN

Javier Senosiain takes that relationship to its most fantastical conclusion at Quetzalcóatl Park outside Mexico City. Paths curl through grassy mounds, architecture takes the form of snakes and spirals, and a greenhouse filters daylight through stained glass onto plants below. Senosiain’s organic architecture deliberately weakens the familiar distinction between building and terrain: walls curve into ceilings, roofs become landscapes, and inhabitable spaces appear to have grown out of the ground rather than been placed onto it. The result suggests that domestic space does not always need to impose an ordering geometry on nature. It can begin by borrowing its forms.

BIG’s Park Rise in Athens translates that relationship between housing and landscape into vertical density. Rising within The Ellinikon development, the 88-home tower steps outward in a cascade of planted terraces, reinterpreting the familiar Athenian balcony as what Hanna Johansson describes as a three-dimensional landscape. Private gardens, communal amenities and pedestrian connections attempt to reconcile the intimacy of the individual home with the scale of a new urban district. Its proposition is a familiar but still difficult one: density does not necessarily have to mean giving something up. With enough attention to light, outdoor space and shared infrastructure, living closer together might also create more generous ways of inhabiting the city.

THERE IS NO UNIVERSAL WAY TO BUILD A GOOD CITY

That skepticism toward universal solutions becomes even clearer at the scale of the city. OMA managing partner David Gianotten cautioned against treating ideas such as the fifteen-minute city as formulas that can simply be reproduced from one place to another. Accessibility, mobility and proximity matter, but so do existing buildings, cultural habits, land values and the people already occupying a neighborhood. In Rome, Taipei and Amsterdam, OMA’s work instead begins with what is already there and asks what should be retained as conditions change. Perhaps future cities require fewer masterplans pretending to predict the future and more frameworks capable of being negotiated, adapted and inhabited over time.

Digital nomadism showed what happens when those local conditions collide with an increasingly mobile global population. Across Lisbon, Mexico City, Athens and Bali, architecture is being reshaped around residents whose income and work may be disconnected from the places they temporarily inhabit. Apartments become short-term rentals, neighborhood businesses shift toward international clientele, interiors converge into a familiar global aesthetic, and in Bali even agricultural land and water infrastructure come under pressure. The question is not whether people should be free to move, but what happens when a city makes itself progressively easier to inhabit temporarily and harder to inhabit permanently. Habitation, we learned, is ultimately also a question of who is able to remain.

Roma Continua Mobility | image © IT’S, OMA, OKRA, NET Engineering, and LGSMA

THE PLAN IS NEVER REALLY FINISHED

MODES OF HABITATION began with the idea that the home might be where we first rehearse different ways of living. What emerged was something broader. A floor can alter how a body moves. A kitchen can redistribute time. A sofa can encourage strangers to gather. A wall can become habitat. An apartment can adapt — or fail to — as its occupants change. And beyond the front door, neighborhoods and cities continually reorganize who gets access to space, proximity and belonging. Perhaps the most useful lesson is therefore not that architecture determines how we live, but that habitation is always a negotiation between a plan and the lives that eventually occupy it. Those lives will change, ignore instructions, bring new needs, invite other inhabitants and sometimes make the original idea obsolete. The challenge is not to design a perfect answer, but to leave enough room for the answer to keep changing. We shape our homes, and then, slowly, they shape us back.

Twelve Ideal Cities – Twelve Cautionary Tales, 1971 | image via MAXXI

This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.