U / R HOME

The U / R HOME project is an initiative from MLAV.LAND. U / R HOME stands for University / Retirement Home. Based on an analysis of statistics about studying, working and retiring, we develop the hypothesis of a shorter time of work in life. Due to automation and the arrival of new technologies, human labor could slowly disappear. This hypothesis brings together and interweaves two separate parts of life: studying and retiring, no longer disconnected by a long period of work.

We do not consider the notion of degrowth as a negation of progress, but as a use of our growing capacities for a project of common good, liberated from the capitalist ideology of infinite growth. The architecture of degrowth is at the heart of our project, in its program, its form and its materiality.

The term degrowth could qualify this aging body, often sidelined, that we want to connect to younger generations. To create a space for transgenerational sharing, wealth, cultures and stories.

Older people, like the younger generations, are living more and more in a sense of loneliness and detachment from a rapidly changing society. The connection of these populations, with strong experiences to tell, to share, with a large amount of knowledge to reveal, carries a social model of sharing, which encourages reflection on the economic, political, and social archetypes of our predecessors.

It is also the choice of a tortuous form, advocating the meeting of the bodies that compose it, rather than an acceleration of its flows. In opposition to the productivist flows, characterized by the line or the grid, our project develops itself according to an organic form, which gives space for pause, gathering, meeting and sharing.

And finally it is a matter, earth. This natural material implies respect for the environment, from its manufacture to its dismantling. Associated with large-scale 3D printing technologies, the space unfolds in the form of curved surfaces, with their bends, their convolutions.

The U / R HOME project tries to answer the problematics of an aging population, automation of human labor and durability. Topics we have to face by redefining our ways of living and inhabiting. We hope to contribute to the development of an architecture of degrowth in a world that must rethink itself, in order not to sink.