Some places within our built environnement seem to be closed to the outside, almost evading from the rest of the world. People living in gated communities, hermits monks, and even the burning man community tries to create it's own inner world, almost forgetting we live in a globalized world.
But when ones looks closer, it appears that these places aren't as much sealed as they appear. Even the Athos mount monks surf the web !
The notion of the limits between several entities within the city is what lead this project. Through two examples, we tried to analyze le relationships that can appear when you put next to each other two things that seem completely opposite. We call it the ambivalent microcosms, pushing the paradoxes already existing in a place to their limits can produce the metropolitan life, or at least allows us to analyse some of the city mechanisms.
Our story takes place in a randomly chosen suburb of Paris. Two places, completely opposite. One is a large housing complex merging 4000 times the same flat into a modernistic distopy. The other in an empty plot surrounded by a sea formed from thousands of different suburban homes. The paradoxes exist between public and private space, density and sprawl, the quality of the one being the default of the other.
Here, the city is like a huge mechanism, made from a multiplicity of smaller entities that are more or less connected / disconnected. Contradiction is a statement.
