© Bertrand Verney
© Bertrand Verney
© Bertrand Verney
© Bertrand Verney
Typological innovation is never a solitary act. It demands a taste for adventure, a clear vision, and tenacious, well-reasoned conviction. Against regulatory and normative expectations, against standardization, developing a creative typology is always something of a calling. To break away from the eternal day/night divisions of domestic space, to subvert the notion that a bedroom can only be a bedroom and a living room only a living room — in short, to dismantle the home in order to free its spaces from their fixed and everlasting functions — this is the challenge that Sophie Delhay has met with striking success. She could not have achieved it without the full support of her client, Grand Dijon Habitat, and the ongoing collaboration with the property managers, those who ensure the life of this built heritage over the decades. Emerging from a negotiated commission, and thus freed from the framework of an architectural competition, this project wagers that the only truly relevant criterion in housing is neither status nor size, but configuration: single or grouped?
Each room in the Sophie Delhay residence offers this dual experience of scale and collectivity, while each apartment proposes to its inhabitants a blend of domesticity and urbanity, openness and gathering, retreat and intimacy. Exemplary in its typology and radically libertarian in spirit, this project paradoxically becomes a manifesto for the next fundamental question that should concern all those involved in housing:
With whom do we live?
