Bureau

MARIA Apartment

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

MARIA APARTMENT

Daniel Zamarbide

ARCHITECTS
Daniel Zamarbide

CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISION
Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger

PROJECT TEAM
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta, Galliane Zamarbide

CONCEPT DESIGN
Daniel Zamarbide, João Paixão, Carine Pimenta, Francisco Castelo Branco

CONSTRUCTION DRAWINGS
Carine Pimenta, Jolan Haidinger, Tobias Vonder Mühll

PUBLICATION DRAWINGS
Driss Veyry

AREA
88 m²

YEAR
2020

LOCATION
Lisbon, Portugal

CATEGORY
Renovation, Apartment Interiors

The architectural classification that is applied to how an apartment plan is distributed, how its parts are arranged is frequently referred to as housing typology: it defines and catalogs common characteristics or types.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

It is quite well known the concept in architecture, and particularly in spaces dedicated to inhabitation: apartments, houses.

Typologies are usually reflected in plan models, with iterations of room distribution patterns.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

Inevitably, in order to apply a certain type of plan to a given situation or context, one needs to decide (in rare cases) or inherit (in most cases) to which kind of living it corresponds.

At this point, the exercise becomes quite thorny. Norms and regulations dictate how we navigate into housing typologies and they are fabricated using certain notions of what a household might be and how it should behave in its intimate space.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

Cultural habits bring in conventions regarding how a family is supposed to look like, and how it is assumed that it will occupy the house spaces.

Thus, the catalog of possibilities is drastically reduced since, unsurprisingly, the household traditional kit of parts comprehends a heterosexual husband, wife, and one or two kids with intimacy spaces ranging from the more “public” as the dining room to the more private as the parents’ room bathroom.

The greatest percentage of apartments and houses around us belong to this hard-to-question model.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

In 2018 Apple came up with the memojis, a bit behind his Asian competitors but in a sexier look. Memojis create avatar of ourselves by tracking our facial movements.

The idea is that this avatar will learn progressively how to create a catalog of emotional gestures that would specifically define our digital self.

The perversion comes, as Shoshana Zuboff has exposed in her extensive research on Surveillance Capitalism, from a continuously reversed movement: providing our avatar with a series of classifiable emotional facial gestures, we somehow subjugate these gestures to the technological limitations of the app.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

This going back and forth between our face and the phone screen blurs our power of command to a point where we will probably never really know if we have informed the avatar about our facial emotional possibilities or if its technological capacities have conditioned our smiles.

I guess that the same applies to the typological conditioning of our spaces. We will never know who is at command. But we do know, as architects, designers, that these conditions do not consider diversity.

We are forced to work as if every space was addressed to one single category of non-gendered, monolithic households. Who is thus designing our living spaces?What are the unsaid values imposed on housing typologies? Is there space, in our houses, for companion-species?

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

Does an apartment for a single person respond to the same space organization as one for a family of four? Does it allow appropriation? Flexibility in use? Are the needs of a contemporary family the same as in the past?

MARIA is just an apartment, a place for an occupant that can potentially always sleep on a couch, live with a dog, cook on the balcony, eat on the floor, read in the bathroom, stand on the kitchen counter, and decide that she does not need to catalog her multiple, rich and diverse everyday gestures and usage rituals to create an avatar of herself.

MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira

MARIA is a disconnected physical space waiting to be inhabited in the richest way possible, without prejudices and directed ways of inhabitation. As space, MARIA has an undefined sexual identity.


MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira


MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira
MARIA Apartment
© Francisco Nogueira


MARIA Apartment
Site plan
MARIA Apartment
Floor plan


MARIA Apartment
Section
MARIA Apartment
Section
MARIA Apartment
Section
MARIA Apartment
Axonometry

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T +351 218 080714
Bureau
Rua Sol a Santana 35 R/C, 1150-342 Lisboa, Portugal