Living in "sequence shot"

1 The dynamism with which contemporary society is changing how people relate to each other, in structures of cohabitation, work, leisure, etc., as well as between people and the places where these relationships take place, clashes on the one hand with the inertia of existing built spaces and, on the other, calls for appropriate ways of thinking about and resolving the new ones that these relationships are called upon to accommodate. 2 This gap is particularly difficult to bridge in the case of public housing, which involves numerous levels and parties acting as intermediaries between demand and the built product, and which, in the West, has only recently, after decades of neglect, seen renewed, much-needed interest from institutions and architectural culture. 3 These new, increasingly changeable and unstable configurations of living are undermining an entire system centred on private housing in its relationship with public services, the former varying almost solely in its capacity to accommodate people, the latter tending to be concentrated to achieve economies of scale, and on the system of regulations, construction methods, public intervention policies, the financing system, market organisation, etc. connected to it. 4 With the eye of the designer, i.e. someone who focuses on the concrete material and formal definition of living spaces, we have tried to observe these phenomena through the category of the threshold, paying attention not so much to “durations”, i.e. moments of equilibrium and stability of a state, but to its passages of change as a meaningful and identifying element. Relational thresholds between different users, temporal thresholds in uses and construction processes, and spatial thresholds read in a sequence from “kerbside and street window” imagined as a succession, in both directions of travel, of selective interruptions of space characterised by specific attention to those who continue, those who stop, those who enter, with possible alternatives of routes and with the need to maintain continuity without solution and gradations of specificity in which what is lost - because it is no longer possible beyond a threshold - is added to what is acquired because it was not possible before the threshold. A way of reading the phenomena described, the case studies analysed, the educational projects and international research that form the basis of the proposed discussion.