Thomas Toffel

TERRITORIAL HABITATION

With the renaissance of the city as a place to live, and the credo of inner densification, we are no longer building large-scale housing set in the landscape. While in the city it is mostly morphological and typological aspects that determine the design of housing, we want to take territorial structures as a basis of our projects.

Territories shaped by the totality of forces, visible but mostly invisible, that act upon and within them. The aim is to investigate the potential of these structures with regard to forms of housing tat might exhibit a new understanding of context, landscape and nature: forms of living situated beyond our bourgeois ideals of urban living and whose specificity are drawn from the large scale.

Over the course of the semester we will design large-scale housing projects. The work will begin with the careful and analytical search for a place whose territorial characteristics will determine the project. The scale chosen brings to focus the question of spatial and load-bearing structures, as well as their ordering principles based on notions of series, rhythm, rationality, etc. The floor plan will be the most important instrument for us : as an abstract yet simultaneously the most communicative notation for spatial configurations.