Architectural Cases

Barcelona and New York-based studio TAKK is challenging the long-standing conventions of residential architecture, advocating for a reimagining of living spaces beyond the traditional room-and-corridor model. Through their architectural practice and extensive research, founders Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño propose a more fluid and responsive approach to home design. They argue that contemporary homes should be organized around evolving factors such as climate, varying degrees of intimacy, caregiving needs, and shared living arrangements, rather than fixed, specialized rooms. This innovative perspective seeks to create dynamic environments that are adaptable to the diverse and changing lifestyles of their inhabitants.

TAKK contends that the familiar layout of distinct rooms connected by corridors is not an inherent architectural truth, but rather a historical construct rooted in the rise of the modern bourgeois home. This traditional arrangement, which emerged over a century ago, shaped not only spatial organization but also reinforced specific social, economic, and energy consumption patterns. Such designs, the studio observes, can hinder natural ventilation, encourage uniform temperature control across an entire dwelling, and subtly embed hierarchies among occupants and their daily activities. Moreover, these conventional layouts can influence the visibility of care work, define what constitutes a 'standard' family unit, and even dictate which species are welcome indoors. As TAKK plainly states, domestic architecture has never been a neutral entity; it actively produces and reflects certain ways of living.

This critical stance forms the core of TAKK's interdisciplinary practice, which spans built projects, art installations, exhibitions, and academic inquiry. The studio’s broader investigations delve into how ecological frameworks can transform not only the materials used in architecture but also the political and material imaginaries it generates. Notable achievements include Luzárraga and Muiño's curation of the Catalan Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, and their ongoing '100 Words for Water' research project, published by Lars Müller Publishers. This project convenes experts from architecture, philosophy, activism, and science to provoke a deeper reconsideration of humanity's relationship with water. However, it is within the domestic interior that these complex concerns—involving resources, bodies, temperature, and power—become most tangibly immediate, serving as a precise laboratory for their ideas.

TAKK emphasizes that a house does more than merely accommodate life; it actively shapes it. The placement of a kitchen, the presence or absence of a door, the nature of a threshold between two areas, or the dimensions of a communal space can profoundly influence social interactions, the blending of activities, and the visibility of care routines. Consequently, the studio prefers to view housing as an 'infrastructure for coexistence' rather than a mere 'container of functions.' Instead of rigidly assigning single activities to individual rooms, architectural design should begin by considering the types of relationships it aims to foster. While this conceptual shift might appear minor on blueprints, its social implications are far-reaching.

The relevance of this approach is amplified by the increasing diversity of contemporary households, which frequently deviate from the traditional nuclear family model that much twentieth-century housing was designed to serve. TAKK highlights the prevalence of intergenerational living, communal arrangements among friends, homes shared for economic or social reasons, and the routine negotiation of space with companion animals. The studio argues that prevailing architectural models largely fail to adequately represent this evolving social tapestry. Thus, designing a home transcends simply determining the optimal number of bedrooms; it necessitates a conscious decision about which relationships to facilitate, which forms of care to render visible, and which new modes of coexistence to enable.

This perspective elucidates why TAKK's domestic experiments often seek not to eliminate rooms entirely, but rather to diminish their rigid authority. Privacy, for instance, can exist along a spectrum rather than being solely contingent on a single door. Functions can overlap and merge, and various parts of a home can become more or less suitable for habitation depending on the season, temperature, or time of day. This fluidity replaces the static nature of fixed plans with something akin to a dynamic set of conditions. As the studio articulates, "Designing a dwelling is less about crafting specific spaces and more about cultivating the circumstances from which alternative ways of communal living can emerge." In this interpretation, the house remains purposefully 'unfinished'—not as a prescriptive guide for daily life, but as an adaptable framework capable of embracing its inherent complexities.

This embrace of flexibility extends to challenging another deeply ingrained domestic convention: the expectation of constant, uniform comfort. TAKK notes that for decades, wellbeing has increasingly been equated with maintaining a consistent indoor temperature, irrespective of external climate, orientation, or seasonal changes. This notion, while recent historically, is energetically demanding. Historically, human habitation was far more adaptive; occupants would move towards sunlight in colder months, seek shade in summer, and utilize different areas of a home throughout the day or year. TAKK is not advocating for discomfort but proposing that comfort itself could become 'dynamic, localized, and changing.' This approach allows architecture to collaborate with climatic variations instead of mechanically suppressing them.

From this viewpoint, constraints such as budget, energy, and resource limitations are not unfortunate obstacles but rather valuable design prompts. They compel a more insightful—and perhaps more constructive—question: what are our true necessities for living well, and what practices have we merely inherited as default settings? TAKK suggests that future homes may not be less comfortable, but instead more adaptable, more attuned to seasonal rhythms, and more actively connected to their environments. Thus, 'life after rooms' does not imply a future devoid of bedrooms or kitchens. Instead, it signifies recognizing that these familiar architectural boxes are merely one organizational paradigm for domestic life, not its ultimate or exclusive form. After a century of architecture often serving to insulate us from the external world, TAKK's proposition is refreshingly straightforward: perhaps the home could cease its resistance to its surroundings and instead learn to coexist with them.