Infinity Home
New housing in the digital era
This project won the Great European Prize of Innovation Le Monde-Smart Cities. (Read the article from Le Monde)
This work is about a co-living model which is neither a participatory housing nor a community housing but a housing where the surface of the private sphere is reduced to the benefit of a wide variety of shared areas for the inhabitants, managed through digital. This allows both to increase the living space and to make more profitable the built area while promoting social cohesion.
Video about Infinity Home project in French with English subtitles
The evolution of family models and customs combined with demographic, ecological and economic crises led us to re-examine the ways of living. We studied on the one hand past and present experiments (shared housing, participatory housing, co-living etc) and on the other hand the opportunities offered by the evolution of techniques.
The arrival of digital technology in physical spaces, buildings (smart-buildings) and cities (smart-city), brings new opportunities. It allows, among other things, to release the latent value through better organization of sharing, better temporal management of places and a simplification of mutual assistance.
The digital architecture acts on the modes of use which can be improved by designing a suitable physical architecture. By working around these actions and interactions between physical and digital architectures, we developed a housing that allows us to better meet needs, to improve the quality of life and to offer, in the heart of cities, much more space for every inhabitant.
This type of housing is ecological, first because it increases the use of resources by optimizing each square meter built, then, because it reduces the displacements. It supports intergenerational ties, but also requires to think back and above all not to forget some anthropological fundamentals such as notions of space appropriation, privacy, sharing.
This new relationship between physical and digital architecture is an opportunity to put back in order the mapping of cyberspace by creating subsets based on physical locations. It is made possible through an application that transforms our smartphone into a digital compass able to positioning our space searches – according to needs, desires, climate, crowd etc – but also to offer new possibilities in terms of activities, uses and exchanges. Variable in time, our physical space is modified and fixed in real time thanks to digital.
Opened on the city, the newly designed buildings block becomes an active urban block. In other words, it is both consumer and producer of existing or new resources (new services).
Nowadays, the act of building is a permanent act of inscription more and more subject to obsolescence and new buildings represent only a tiny part of the housing construction. Consequently, it is unthinkable that we continue to build the same housings without considering the societal and technological changes taking place in our cities.
« Infinity Home » is an answer, a guide to build blocks composed of active buildings and environments that reconsider the act of inhabiting today from the point of view of the specificities of each inhabitant and their ability to exchange. It gives time to time and multiplies the local synergies.
Eric Cassar
Calendar Studies 2015-2017
Financing EPA Marne and Caisse des dépôts as part of the program Ecocité 2 – Ville de demain – investissements d’avenir (from June 2016)
Arkhenspaces Team
- Supervised by Eric Cassar in collaboration with Nicolas Moulin architect
- Tinhinan Laoubi, Osama Abou Samra, Namyong Kim, Marine Lardé, Mohamed Ali S’habou, Léa Vincent (2016)
- Valentina Bonuglia, Andrea Salaberri (2015)
- Application model developed with I-Porta
Habiter autrement
Infinity home in 13mn + debate with Michel Maffesoli, sociologist and Caroline Reminy (Leonard:Paris en july 2018) [FR]
Infinity home : new habitat model in a smart-building Lecture in IRI (Research and et Innovation institute) – 40 mn – in Centre Pompidou with Bernard Stiegler [FR]
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