studio sam chermayeff

Lost in the Supermarket

Thesis project by Ivy Aris
Vienna, Austria

Concerned with the prevailing loneliness felt in the city, the project looks at how the configuration of domestic space impacts our perception of connection. As a high-density housing proposal in the south of Vienna, the work explores an expanded idea of visual privacy; asking why we have come to be so concealed throughout our homes and positing that this insularity could be reconsidered in favour of connection to neighbour. Reversing the typical logic of front and back found in Viennese Gründerzeit blocks, the project investigates the power of observability in the home as an architectural tool for connection, with neighbours facing each other rather than out towards an anonymous city. Visual privacy is sought throughout the house rather than the de-facto, and the work calls on inhabitants to occupy it along this gradient in pursuit of a non-didactic community where the orchestration of these subtle interactions could be enough to make us feel less alone.

@ivy_aris