Oslo Architecture Triennale
Villa Otium
Research
2019

 
 
ON CITIES
 
 
 
While users don’t pay for using Facebook services, over 98% of the company’s revenue comes from advertising that Facebook shows on the feed with the help of data that users provide to the algorithm. Every time that we log in to social media, we volu…
 
 
 
In 2016 the PNL, an independent French rap group formed by Tarik and Nabil Andrieu, invested 120 000 Euro/month to rent a billboard on the ring road surrounding Paris. The location justified the incredibly high rent—an ad campaign could reach over 5…
 
 
 
The Villa is located along the Parisian ring road, not far from La Villette Park, by Bernard Tschumi. The site is a terrain vague, in-between a large parking lot and an underused public garden. The project aims to question different scenarios such a…
 
 
 
BUILDING STRUCTURE
 
EXTERNAL VIEW
 
 
 
TYPICAL PLAN
 
The villa is composed of a uniform repetition of identical rooms. Instead of giving a specific function to each room, instead we decided to consider them like a Japanese washitsu, an open room with no dedicated purpose. Any unused or unneeded furnit…
 
In David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, there is a film so entertaining that viewers lose all interest in anything other than watching it. What would the role of entertainment be if we did not have to work? Would it become an addiction?
 
 

The project proposes an alternative model for an urban communal villa, where tenants are completely freed from work and domestic labour.

WORK
In a society where the exchange of products and services has become the main public activity, people tend not to be considered as political subjects anymore, but rather producers forced to follow the mantra “faster, better, further”.
What is most striking today is that “production” is becoming more and more immaterial, to the point where work cannot be differentiated from life itself. Capitalism demands we produce knowledge, images, symbols, languages, solutions, lifestyles, and feelings, rather than just material goods. In this sense production is becoming unavoidably biopolitical, blurring the limit between life and work. If citizens are considered as restless producers, then cities must to be planned, managed and experienced as purely productive devices, whose main goal is to maximize economic growth according to market needs.

OTIUM
From this point of view, one the most radical acts of resistance against the status quo is the refusal to work—rejecting the obligation to ensure endless growth.

The idea of being freed from work dates back to the classical period, when the Greek and Roman leisure classes developed the concept of otium, a time of total inactivity, which encouraged contemplation, research, meditation, exercise, and leisure. Otium was a means to repurpose one’s own life. It was a form of self-regulation and personal freedom. The architectural typology that was dedicated par excellence to otium was the rural villa, conceived as a quiet and introverted place, the very antithesis of the busy and chaotic city.

VILLA
Our research proposes an alternative model for an urban communal villa, where tenants are completely freed from work and domestic labour. In an almost dystopian scenario, we propose that rent from an oversized billboard would be the tenants’ only source of income. The profit generated by the ads would not be reinvested in capital accumulation, but rather used to pay off the initial investment and sustain the household. The project raises different questions such as “what would we do if we no longer had to pursue an income?” or “can we preserve our ethical integrity while fighting within and against capitalism?”