Design Exhibition Explores How Homes Shape the Way We Live

A design exploration titled Modes of Habitation has brought together a wide range of architectural projects to examine a deceptively simple question: what kind of world do we rehearse at home? Curated by Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou, the chapter treats the home not as a finished object but as a testing ground for comfort, community, permanence, and change. Across kitchens, conversation pits, underground houses, residential towers, and entire cities, the featured projects suggest that the spaces we inhabit actively shape how we move, work, rest, and understand what belongs to us.

One of the most direct challenges to conventional domestic comfort comes from 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 a home should prevent the body from slipping into habit, keeping inhabitants alert through continuous physical negotiation with their surroundings. Their claim that such architecture might extend life was intentionally extreme, but the underlying question 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.

The idea that a home should be able to change is complicated by the story of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. 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 complicates 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.

Living together, the chapter suggests, 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 viewers 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. The home, in this view, 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.

Author

Delaney Sawyer

Society Reporter

Delaney Sawyer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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