ARCHITECTURES OF COLLECTIVITY

My work is an investigation of the relationship between architecture and its environments, in the largest physical and conceptual senses. For the past few years, this work has been centered on Paris, though what I have studied in this context reappears in other geographies as well.

Paris, as a city, is celebrated for its remarkable public spaces: cafes, parks, squares, and civic buildings, allowing people to be in the presence of others in urban surroundings. Parisian suburbs, which house a large population who gravitate around the city, are often identified as spaces of violence, disparity, and segregation.

I have documented these suburbs in their current conditions by defining the ground as the primary element that holds both the formed structure of the city and the shifting fields of public housing projects in the suburbs. I have looked for the physical and the metaphorical shared space between the city and the suburbs, between the spaces of the social housing complexes and their open grounds and between individuals and their dwellings.

From the interwar period until the late seventies, while architects in France experimented with housing in unprecedented quantities, they were tasked to design large projects, which included open spaces, sometimes at the scale of entire neighborhoods. These projects required, implicitly and explicitly, integrating other practices, such as landscape and urban design, into the realm of architecture.

Thinking with physical and material forms, manifested in the shape and make of the buildings, but also in forms of living, specifically living together. I study the intentions and promises of envisioning these “architectures of collectivity” by analyzing a series of housing complexes, concentrated in the Seine Saint-Denis Department, located in the northern part of the Petite Couronne, a constellation of three departments that encircle the historic Paris.

Rediscovering this shared ground through visual analysis is part of a larger research project focused on these environments, aiming to tell their story and those of their inhabitants differently.