A Room of One’s Own, A house for All

"Through the glass walls, I see myself, my room, my clothes, my movements — repeated a thousand times over. This is bracing: you feel yourself a part of a great, powerful, single entity.¹ »

In his novel, We, Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin narrates a dystopian post-revolutionary world where subjects are identified by numerical names. The planet has been organized into an omnipotent One State, ruled by the Great Benefactor. The Machiavellian, hegemonic figures of the past have handed over their scepter to the Number of Numbers. The principe of "my home is my castle" has been retired, and with it, the introversion of the opaque dwelling. Buildings are now made of glass² and the Numbers are perpetually visible, always washed in light, facilitating the surveillance work of the guardians. At the perimeter of this panoptic One State rises the Green Wall of glass; circular in plan, it separates the infinity of the world from the hierarchically structured, and divided into convenient segments, finitude of the human mind. Nothing can exist on the other side, and freedom is only possible within its boundaries. There, behind the “eternal modern glass”, looms the wild, the irrational, the ineffable: “the world of the square root of -1³”. On the inside, ”we” prevails; on the outside, “I”.

In Zamyatin’s work, D-503—a loyal adherent to the laws and ideals of the One State—encounters I-330. She succeeds in leading him astray, persuading him to visit the “Ancient House.” The scene they discover within evokes a swirling carousel, dominated by a primitive, disorganized, crazy medley of colors and forms. A significant distinction from the transparent, glass structure of the One State is observed here: light does not flood the space but filters into the house’s interior through the small apertures of windows. Referring to the anatomy of the human body, one instantly perceives the parallel between the architectural shell and the opaque epidermis, as well as between the microscopic windows and the eyes that allow a projection into the interiority within. Human nature itself resembles an “ancient room”. Each room corresponds to a unique point of view, a singular subjective gaze—a perception of the world—an unbearable, singular chaos, an entire city; and all rooms together: “Thousands of microscopic, eternally warring states⁴”.

What if we start from the room⁵ rather than the structure?

“Some thirty inches from my nose, the frontier of my Person goes, […] Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit” writes in one of his poem W. H. Auden. Architectural composition is grounded in the notion that if we want to live together, we must always retain the option to live alone. Living together but apart—what theoretician Manfredo Tafuri calls voluntary alienation in collective form⁶—recalls the spatial and social organization from the early monks to soviet “disurbanists”, in which individual huts were organized around communal spaces.

Semiotician Roland Barthes distinguishes two realms as “chambre” and “total space”, ascribing interiority to the former and collective life to the latter⁷. The room is detached from the collective structure in which it is contained—or perhaps it is the other way around. Chambre is the term from which we depart, and total space the one at which we arrive. Or is it, instead, a double conquest of two terms that share nothing in common, much like Zamyatin's world of I and We? The room projects the collective space into its interior from a subjective perspective, while the collective space contains the room as its constituent part, producing a third formation where each term transforms the other.

A Room of One’s Own

«Each simple substance is a mirror of the same universe, […] the perceptions of creatures […] are differentiated by relations and […] by the point of observation (point de vue)⁸”.

From Zamyatin, we move to philosopher Leibniz, whose world consists of simple, autonomous, distinct, and indivisible substances capable of forming complexes. For Gilles Deleuze, another philosopher, these resemble a cell—a crypt without openings, an architectural ideal of a room made of black marble, where light enters through tiny apertures, much like those of a camera obscura. Nothing of the exterior is visible, yet the pure interior is illuminated and colored, through reflections, by all kinds of trompe l’œil. This description relates them to a room equivalent to the Renaissance Studiolo: a place for private contemplation, concentration, and spiritual quest, where all actions unfold within the internal enclosure.

The notion of enclosure does not imply, however, that the room opposes the exterior due to its split from the within. On the contrary, Leibniz attributes a representation of the exterior to the interior, of the complex to the simple, of the multitude to the unity, through sharp apertures⁹—invisible to the occupant themselves—reminiscent of those by Le Corbusier at La Tourette. The room becomes a canvas ready to be decorated with the unfolding structures produced by the system: light-mirror-unique perspective, much like an Escher painting.

The subject finds their own sanctuary, living within their individual, swirling “ancient room”—a space where Virginia Woolf’s alter-ego would have the chance to exercise her autonomy: a room of one’s own¹⁰. Here, privacy is not a property, but the capacity for isolation, concentration, and withdrawal from public, social, and the daily sphere of production. Composed of key elements such as the desk-boudoir, the closet, the sleeping area, and a personal space for hygiene, the private room constitutes a white calvinist box on the exterior and, simultaneously, a dark seabed on the interior, filled with ornamentation, objects and colors through illusion—reminiscent of the negative of Absalon’s Cellules.

Absalon’s œuvre focuses on investigating individualism, characterized by a deliberate retreat from societal structures and normative frameworks. By reconfiguring the spatial dynamics between the body and its environment, he practiced an ascetic existence that rejected the traditional constructs of bourgeois domesticity. What connects his architectural experiments in habitation to the Leibnizian studiolo is the unique perspective. The artist did not design his units as architectural ideals of living for the masses, but solely as a tool for imposing ascetic discipline upon his own existence. He created his own rules within his own unique room, in order to escape those of consumer culture.

The inviolable, private shell evolves into a space of subjective resistance. Just as Absalon, in his work Solutions, films himself escaping the concept of the “universal man” imposed by late capitalism through the habitation of his unit, so too the distorted, curved lines of the mirrored individual room now resemble lines of flight from the world of Zamyatin. “A white flat area above; dark blue walls; red, green, and orange bindings of ancient books; yellow bronze— chandeliers, a statue of Buddha; furniture built along lines convulsed in epilepsy.¹¹” The rigid, grid-like numerical index organizing the standardized glass cell of the One State has now been transformed into a folding canvas by Victor Vasarely, moving beyond Pier Vittorio Aureli’s inquiry into whether “less is enough¹²” and shifting the focus toward a significant dilemma: the choice between being universal or unique.

A house for All

We no longer have domestic units, but multiplicities of habitation within unique, interior entities sharing a common structure. Rooms develop within the world of the One and become two, then three, four, and so forth. Their coexistence can be perceived “as a garden full of plants or as a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant […] is also such a garden or such a pond¹³”. A conglomeration and a seeming chaos, much like the movement of fish within an aquarium, produces a choreography—or rather, a resultant choreography of distinct movements, akin to Japanese dance Butoh. The house for all is defined neither by the geometry of the structure nor by the arrangement of the walls, but by the movement of the subjects within it, with the final form of the “total space” emanating from social relations. It is a process that emerges from within, precisely as it occurs in the Furniture House by the Metabolist designer Kenji Ekuan.

In this 1:1 scale negotiation, the rooms are no longer isolated. They are organized around communal spaces, forming typologies where the placement of one becomes a prerequisite for the next. They function through a system of structural and social interdependence, much like Tetris, reminding us that private space is always part of a larger collective—with the game this time unfolding in three dimensions. Each piece can connect with any other, regardless of shape, locking into the grid-space and fitting it like an organ to a whole organism, or a glove to a hand.

However, this does not represent a tree-like hierarchy of a closed collective organism that can be divided into cells and sub-sets. Here, philosopher Henri Bergson intervenes: “Who can say where individuality begins and ends, […] whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which dissociates itself into cells ?¹⁴” As the speed of the Tetris game increases, the player ceases to think according to the rules of the three-dimensional puzzle; they lose the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the cell and the organism, acting instead through pure intuition and flow. The collective structure itself becomes the in-motion development of the internal form, like a labyrinthine scaffolding in a state of constant variation. The predetermined, orthogonal grid of 10 x 20 subdivisions begins to distort, as Vasarely’s perspectivism returns to the foreground. The House for All has taken the form of the interior of the Room of One’s Own, while simultaneously being projected within it. We went back at our starting point: the vantage point of a continuous dialectic between the chambre and the total space.

RoomCity

The Neue Stadt is a project by Oswald Mathias Ungers for a satellite-town of 100,000 inhabitants, located in the northern suburbs of Cologne, poised to provide a solution to the housing crisis facing the region during the post-war period. Given that further rationalization and a corresponding reduction in rental prices were possible only to a certain extent, the apartment's surface area had to be diminished. The small dwelling was thus transformed into Existenzminimum, a subject of intense debate since the second CIAM (1929). The slogan “a small apartment is better than no apartment” established the framework within which the settlement would be composed. The core compositional element of the overall master plan is the multiplied private room. In plan view, the project develops as a synthetic sequence reminiscent of a game of Tetris, as analyzed previously. The resulting volumetric complexity stems from the development of rooms at varying heights, creating a structure devoid of clear hierarchical organization—a city made of rooms, the so-called RoomCity.

What we discern in Ungers’ proposal is life behind the labyrinthine scaffolding. If, for a moment, we look beyond the chaotic morphology of his urban organization, a continuous flow of interconnections and tensions emerges. Every point can connect with any other, without the existence of a primary central entity, transforming the urban whole from a tree into a rhizomes¹⁵. Tetris is a rhizome trapped within a grid. The city shifts from a finite totality and its concentric growth—enclosed by the glass wall—toward a hidden network of individual points-rooms that expands horizontally without beginning or end. The Existenzminimum gives way to a dialogue between Co-Existenzminimum and Co-Existenzmaximum, a crucial element in addressing the contemporary housing crisis within our own cities and their existing building stock.

The city of the One vs The city of All

We began with the city of the One, Zamyatin’s Number of numbers, and we have arrived at the city of All. Here, there is no longer the One that becomes “many”, nor the One that divides into many, but rather the multiple generating multiplicities. Its form resembles more of an endless meadow, a dense, natural green expanse, rather than a pattern of absolute order like that of industrial monocultures. “Instead of thinking of the meadow, let us think of that stem with the two clover leaves, that slightly curved and lanceolate plant, that slender corymb.¹⁶” In this sense, urban complexity emerges from the coexistence and friction of distinct individual worlds, continuously negotiating their boundaries. Thus, a naturally uniform totality is created through the resultant of individualities perceived by our eye; all numbers trace a plane of consistency within every colorful, closed room of contemplation—the blueprint of their resultant uniformity, a guerrilla war of multiplicities against every city of the One.

1. Zamyatin, Yevgeny, Nous, première édition française chez Gallimard en 1929, traduit à partir de la version anglo-américaine, paru en 2007 chez Actes Sud, dans une traduction à partir du russe. ↗
2. Dans le monde panoptique de Zamyatin, « fait de verre » signifie l’élimination totale de la sphère privée. Être « baigné de lumière » revient à exister dans un état de visibilité permanente. Même à l’intérieur de la chambre privée, la transparence reste la norme ; la vie privée est réduite à une ration réglementée par l’État, accordée uniquement lors des rapports sexuels grâce à des tickets permettant à l’habitant d’abaisser temporairement les stores. ↗
3. √−1 est un motif récurrent dans l’œuvre de Yevgeny Zamyatin ; elle représente l’irrationnel – quelque chose d’intérieur, comme l’âme et l’imagination, qui refuse de se soumettre aux équations de l’État unique. ↗
4. Zamyatin, op. cit. ↗
5. Tafuri, Manfredo, Projet et utopie. Architecture et développement capitaliste, première édition Dunod, 1979. ↗
6. Tafuri, Manfredo, Projet et utopie. Architecture et développement capitaliste, première édition Dunod, 1979. ↗
7. Barthes, Roland, Comment vivre ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976-1977), éditions du Seuil, 2002. ↗
8. G. W. Leibniz à Nicolas Remond, juillet 1714. ↗
9. Deleuze, Gilles, Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque, éditions de Minuit, 1988. ↗
10. Dans A Room of One’s Own (Une chambre à soi, première parution en anglais en 1929), Virginia Woolf introduit Judith Shakespeare – la sœur fictive, mais tout aussi talentueuse, du poète –, soutenant que la créativité nécessite l’égalité des sexes, l’autonomie financière et une chambre privée pour pouvoir s’épanouir. ↗
11. Zamyatin, op. cit. ↗
12. Dans son livre Less is Enough (Strelka Press, 2014), le théoricien Pier Vittorio Aureli considère le « moins » non pas comme un style, mais comme un choix radical du « assez », visant à reprendre possession de la vie face aux pièges capitalistes de la propriété et de la surproduction. ↗
13. Leibniz, G.W., La monadologie, 1714. ↗
14. Bergson, Henri, L’évolution créatrice, éditions Félix Alcand, 1907. ↗
15. Le rhizome, concept développé par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari dans Mille plateaux, utilise la métaphore botanique des tiges horizontales et souterraines pour décrire des multiplicités non hiérarchiques. Contrairement aux conceptions structuralistes, le rhizome fonctionne comme un réseau décentralisé, produisant un modèle de complexité, fluide et interconnecté. ↗
16. Calvino, Italo, Palomar, Le Seuil, 1985. ↗