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real lives / real buildings: living in the city

Part 2 Project 2000
Ute Schmittlutz
London Metropolitan University | UK
real lives/ real buildings: living in the city


Malcolm allowed me to examine the breach between the assumption of how people live and the reality of their lives… the resulting formulation of a proposal based on his habits, aspirations and desires intensified his binary relationship of home and leisure spaces… Malcolm’s spaces of the past and the future.

Pontins: A holiday camp contains a minimum version of necessary domesticity and usually here pleasure and leisure are elevated above one’s normal concerns.

Malcolm’s dislike of dislocation and his strong association with the space he is within, is essential to his character, and an essential trait to the generic characters inhabiting Pontins. Challenging this trait occurs by directly compressing living space and maximizing leisure space on the site; questioning individual and therefore group behaviour of isolation and disintegration, in contrast to, inclusion and integration.

Domey Village is a translation of the framework of temporary accommodation (holiday camp) to a form of permanent housing. The resulting shifts in density toward the spaces of the home made more apparent by the emphasis on leisure and activity spaces, is the symbolic move towards communication, interaction and integration.

Morphing Domey Village as the morphing site is an experiment of closeness transforming into a realistic urban development.

Ute Schmittlutz


Diploma Unit 7 examined the gap between our assumption of how people live and the reality of their lives; between what people have and what they want.
Our interest began in the private and singular realm of the home with an ambitious attempt to map out the dramatic landscape of the interior.
Ute's photo-documentary of her real life subject, Malcolm, were beautifully composed studies of the minutae of everyday life, its peculiarities and negotiations, tensions and needs.
This rich subject matter allowed her to develop a series of partial drawings and diagrams which observed, recorded and intervened in the real occupation and hidden dreams of domestic space.
She worked incrementally from a study of individual idiosyncracy on a micro scale to an acknowledgement of the communal needs of a holiday village at the scale of the city.
She was able to control and articulate each stage of her propositional work, jet was courageous enough to allow her self-imposed brief of Domey village to oscillate between a question and an answer.

2000
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