LIVING EDGE - The Prospect of Architectural and Urban Dimensions of Domestic Borders

The research point of departure is the urban changes, which the city has gone through in the last two decades, where the involvement of social and environmental dimensions has been growing continuously. The study questions the effect of these urban changes on the interplay between the single unit and the city.
The study explores the edge zone in urban residential building, as an architectural zone of interaction of social and environmental dimensions. The study seeks to replace the modernistic approach of continuity and openness with a new attitude of carefully structured and defined relationships. The research examines the current state and the future potential of this change in paradigm.
By the means of the life at the edge and an edge that is living, the study seeks to couple the social and the environmental dimensions into an architectural dialogue that allows and resists their interactions over time. The study searches after the architectural opportunities and challenges of this interplay in relation to the architectural elements, the dwelling, the building and the street.
The scale of investigation is the edge zone of the middle-story unit including the interior and exterior space and the building envelope between them. Since architects normally see the ground floor and urban space as places, where urban life takes place, the focus at the middle-story allows the ‘new urbanity’ to extend to a zone, which normally is not taken into account. This challenge opens up to investigate the public and the urban in the edges of the domestic interior and visa versa.