Most housing moves us directly from public to private.
Street. Door. Living room.
The spaces in between have gradually collapsed into a simple line.
Yet those intermediate spaces are where neighbors meet, children play, privacy is negotiated, and comfort begins.
This week I look at a housing project by Peris + Toral, revisit the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl, and explain how those same ideas are changing the way I am approaching a collective housing project in my own practice.
The next session is this Sunday at 21:30 CET.
Hope you can join me.
Please enjoy, and as always, thank you for your support.
The Sketch: Designing the Threshold
Peris + Toral, “Living in Lime”
The Thought: Why Cities Need Gradients
From Public to PrivateThe Work: Giving Every Family a Garden
Re-thinking Collective Housing
1. The Sketch
Designing the Threshold
Living in Lime - Peris + Toral
Most housing treats the journey from the street to the apartment as a problem to solve as efficiently as possible. You enter. You cross a corridor. You reach your door. Done.
Circulation is reduced, compressed, and hidden because it is treated as expensive space that does not sell.
In Living in Lime, Peris + Toral take a different approach.
Plan showing the extended transition between common space and dwelling.
They slow that transition down.
The movement from public to private is no longer a single line. It becomes a sequence of shared spaces, thresholds, landings, balconies, and open circulation areas where the building can breathe socially before each dwelling becomes private.
That is the important move.
The common areas are not treated as leftover space. They are not simply the minimum distance required to reach the apartments. Circulation is designed, not optimized.
It can be a place where children pass each other, where neighbors recognize one another, where a door can remain slightly open without exposing the whole home, where privacy is negotiated gradually instead of being defended abruptly.
Threshold of a dwelling, seen from the interior toward the common areas.
This matters because community cannot be added to housing afterwards. It has to be drawn into the section, the plan, and the threshold. In this project, the threshold is not only the front door. It is the entire spatial sequence that prepares the move from the city to the home.
Detail plan of two units. Notice how the floor of the “in between” area changes,
extending beyond the front door.
That is why the generosity of these shared spaces is not a luxury. It is the architectural condition that allows domestic life and collective life to coexist.
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