Denisa Badoi

Year of studies: 4th
Assignment: Analysis + intervention
Collaborators: independent project
Brief: The task was to analyse a building of collective housing of the ‘20-’30 in order to better understand how this tipology developed. The studied example could be chosen by each student individually and could be any that was relevant in a discussion about collective housing. The second part of the investigation was to propose interventions on the studied building, be it rehabilitation, reprogramming, or whatever each situation called for.
Summary: I chose to study Narkomfin( Moscow, Russia) because it is a prime example of the constructivism movement and because it was an early display of a lot of the concepts that would come to define collective housing in the last century. These concepts were phrased by Le Corbusier as: the free facade, the open plan, the terrace roof, the sky street, etc.
I chose to intervene in the building in a respectful way that would not alter it or its character in a permanent way. I decided that whatever intervention I was going to plan had to be reversible, and that it had to stand out immediately as something foreign to the original design. The natural idea was to continue the discourse in tipology that Narkomfin had started. The initial building had 3 main types of apartments that, with 4 small elements I was able to turn into 6 different types. These elements had to be as small as possible and easy to take apart. In the end, they were: a capsule-bathroom, a stair, a moving wall, and a bunk-bed. The reversible nature of these intervention made it possible to reorganize the building into many different layouts, and since the apartments were for rent, each new inhabitant could customize his apartment according to his needs.