The demarcation of the line from the sphere of the domestic to the public is a shocking, violent change in scale from the two people you see everyday to the entire island of Manhattan. Abstract relationships to strangers at this city-scale cannot meaningfully define a domestic condition. Instead, we propose that the occupant experiences community in blurry, gradual scales - knowing intimately the three or four people with which they share a kitchen, hosting a dinner party for the 16 people living on the eighth floor with them, seeing around 70 of the residents that regularly attend weekly building-wide events, and serving the hundreds of hungry harlemites eating dinner next door at the communal kitchen.
Housing as an additive, multiscalar weaving of communities on a given site rather than the division of a number of individuals apart from each other. Armature at the element, building, and neighborhood scale become 3 different scales of community; the room, the group of rooms, the city block. Russian nesting dolls. A whole floor of the building is at once your own space, but not only your space. The idea of the unit is interrogated and sort of disassembled – it is a bed, but also a room, a floor, the whole building, the entire neighborhood.
