ABSTRACT
What makes this project interesting is the conception of its private wall spaces as prosthetic extensions of the body. More than in any other case, walls are used as interfaces where the inhabitant of the house can plug into the worldwide net through a variety of existing workstations, or simply nestle into a variety of niches, nooks and built-ins. These interfaces bear resemblances to some of the inhabitable walls of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre. A multiplicity of domestic functions, such as sleeping, cleaning, working or communicating is transferred from the traditional room-space into the wall-interfaces. The notion of bedroom, working space, toilet or bathroom closet is abolished and the appliances disseminated within the walls. These have at this point the same structural and organizational
importance as the cubicles in the Smithsons’ House of the Future. In both cases the traditional notion of rooms is eliminated, provoking an interpenetration of spaces with rather unidentified boundaries. A series of inhabitable passages are created: in the House of the Future, the conceptualization of the house as a large continuous room; in the Lofting House, a sequence of ‘habitable circulations’, as the French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio would call them.139
