2019’s projects and winners

A co-dividual student residence

It is during the exhibition “What is Co-Dividuality” presented from June 2017 to May 2018 at the Farm Cultural Park in Favara, Italy, that this new concept of shared space is discussed. Salvator-John Liotta and Fabienne Louyot, curators of the exhibition and founders of the agency Laps Architecture in Paris, explain that the period we live in – even if it is a period of hyper-digital connection and allows distance communities formation- is also a moment when it becomes necessary to put the being together again at the center of the discourse.

The fact that more than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas causes different types of problems: the abandonment of small towns, the anonymity of life in the big city centers, the risk of not being included or not to find meeting places. In metropolitan areas, thousands of people share spaces not originally designed for living together, for practical reasons such as saving on rent or optimizing common expenses. So in Paris, there would be at least a million people who share their homes with strangers or people with whom they had no connection at first. The problem is that these homes have not been designed to promote this living together.

The glorious architecture of past years gives a way to new examples that make humility and simplicity a distinctive feature of an architecture more appropriate to our time. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a new sensibility, based on the idea of community and sharing of its values. In this sense, the co-dividual space is conceived as a type of sharing space that has always existed but which, periodically – with the erosion of the search for the common good as the main objective of society – remains in crisis.

Allow to rediscover new dimensions, where the value of being and of being together becomes more and more a concrete reality.

The student residence will have to integrate co-dividual spaces conceived as the result of warm and simple, funny and contemporary project reflections, where the co-tenants in addition to their private room have large common areas where to practice urban agriculture, where to give life to a start-up, where to cook together, where to experiment new ergonomics and uses …. The projects do not only concern the domestic space, but must show the emergence of a multifaceted amalgam between public space and private space.