Within, Around and Beyond

– an experiment with the Apartment typology

“The home should be an expanded world, such that one should be at home in the world, the ‘home’ and ‘the world’ are not separate areas of existence but extensions’ of one another through us – we who inhabit it”

– Kaiwan Mehta (Domus |Feb 2018)

Home – the smallest unit of life, is not just a space bounded by four walls, but a container of human interactions, a place of social cohesion, a reflection of human activities, and a medium of communication with the outside world – the urban realm. These complexly layered relationships which define the space, the people, and the city as a whole, have been overshadowed by the commodification of space which has reduced it to a mere object for consumption, transforming the role of the home into a money-making machine, rather than a social institution.

This has drastically changed the housing landscape within the city, creating a difference between the house and the home, the resident and the user, the housing and the urban realm, the planned and the lived space, thus creating individualized identities as against the evolution of a larger whole through a web of interactions and relationships between the body and space.

Thus, the thesis tries to investigates the nature of Apartments – a normative typology in the city, through the lens of ‘Theory of Reciprocity’ by Aldo van Eyck, to re-imagine housing not only as means of serving domesticity but also as an extension of the urbanity. It intends to deconstruct the apartments as a set of reciprocal relationships between the people, space, and the city, establishing an ambivalence between the qualitative and the quantitative aspect of the space