Solitary Living and Social Interactions in Urban Community

Synopsis:

With different scales, functions, and degrees of transparency, interior spaces serve as containers to protect privacy, stimulating communication and participation, therefore responding to individual life and fostering interactions in a community.

Detailed Description:

Communal facilities and informal encounter spaces in a community can be powerful places for social interaction and diversity because they can offer shared experience and shared values by supporting a mutual living system and bonding opportunities. In the meantime, the privacy and the intimacy should also be protected. The boundary between the public and the private can be decided by the spacial form. 

The site is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. This project is a reconstruction of a masonry building. In order to investigate the two extreme conditions of the solitary living and the public interaction for young generations who live in the city, the designed programs are living units, communal kitchen, market, courtyard, and shared living/work place.

By creating a community space with multiple functions, which not only responds to an individual life, but also offers a container to stimulate communication and participation, it lightens up the diversity in the urban context, attracting people from all walks of life to meet, spend time, or simply being alone together.