Development over time.
Spatializing Hospitality
Master’s Degree Project
2023
Spaces of hospitality hold the potential to empower refugees in Sweden. The carried-out design research explored the ritual of hospitality and discovered that indoor public spaces require intimacy to allow users the visibility needed to perform their social and democratic functions. These informed the design outcome as an experiment developing a live-work neighborhood that manipulates these spaces in gradients of privacy to provide refugees the opportunity to claim financial, social, and political visibility.
The design project is based on initial research about experiencing and observing moments of hospitality as both guest and host and analyzing the experiences in drawings using a tool of personal space. The main finding is a critique of the indoor public space in challenging its need of intimate spaces that encourage encounters between friends and strangers. In this way, allowing users temporary claim to them as hosts, encouraging a citizen’s democratic right to indoor public space disregarding financial capacity to engage in commercial activities often being found alongside them.
This was further explored in experiments with the Swedish live-work typology called bokal. It became clear that it holds the potential to empower refugees in to become hosts in Sweden using the typology as a threshold between public and private realms, allowing them visibility and thereby demanding agency. This way, the visibility of the host is based partly on the civil and professional life of the individual. Finally, the project explores scenarios that created a suggestion of a bokal community allowing refugees and other potential users to build social and professional networks from a point of agency and independency rather than as guest people in need of care.
Studio 10: DISPLACEMENT – The Global Challenge, 22/23
Teaching Team: Amalia Katopodis, Prof. Robert Mull and Sangram Shirke
Detail of the design of the window railing design.
Domestic and Commercial use of the window.
Section of the module in its initial stage.
Section of the module in its final stage.
Example of the flexible module’s adaptable domestic and commercial uses forming a diverse neighborhood.
