“Ways of Life” was a call for proposals to several international architects done by Christoph Hesse and Neeraj Bhatia, to design houses in the idyllic peninsula of Scheid in the rural region of North Hesse, Germany. This joint project asked for proposals of homes for the “new ways of life”, described as working and living in the same space. This call, made before the pandemic, was already imagining domestic spaces suitable for working remotely outside of cities and from rural areas, removing the need of living in the center of overpopulated and often stressful cities.
Our design was prompted by our understanding that there has never been a separation between house and work, the biggest example being domestic care and reproductive labour that is performed at home, but is often neglected as a form of work despite being of the most important labour forms that sustain our societies. Even so, in human history the separation of working and living has only been around for the last 200 years, and that is only in urban areas of the western part of the world. Our response was then to analyse different situations in the domestic sphere, focusing not in describing what functions happen in each space, but understanding what type of activities and emotions can a space promote, by its relationship to the ground, by its openness or enclosure, or by its simple volumetric intention.
We created a design tool in the form of a chart that allowed us to describe in a small drawing what situations we could imagine in this living environment, after doing that we decided to choose 6 spaces and developed each of those with a collage: Connection with neighbours – Self – Communal & Collective – Semi- individuality – Temporariness – Family. By resigning to the (sometimes) instinctive practice of labelling spaces according to a pre-established function, and by putting aside the idea of a house being just a cumulus of utilitarian spaces, we were able to address what we found to be an essential question: How can an architectural object become a platform for anyone to create their own way of life?. Other architects participating in the project include Anna Heringer (Germany), Christoph Hesse Architects (Germany), Dogma (Belgium), The Open Workshop (USA/Canada) and Pezo Von Ellrichshausen (Chile), among others.
