Living in Isolation

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the world with unprecedented challenges and is impacting our daily lives by restricting our personal movements radically. It almost goes without saying that this month has continued to see extraordinary, rapid and previously unthinkable changes to public and private spaces. As the virus continues to spread, countries around the globe have ordered citizens to retreat to their homes - and stay there. Social distancing measures drastically scaled down our personal range of movement to our ‘own four walls’. These drastic changes caught us, and our living environments, off guard. As we shelter in our own homes, the rooms where we once spent few waking hours now encapsulate our entire existence. However, our personal living space cannot absorb all factettes of ‘living’, ‘working’, and ‘leisure’ activities. The new reality has to be looked at from a political and a spatial development angle, but more importantly it has to be seen in a sociological perspective which invites us to look at our familiar surroundings in a fresh way. It encourages us to take a new look at the world we have always taken for granted and to examine our very personal spatial environment with the same curiosity that we might bring to an exotic foreign culture. The Atelier Kopfhoch competition seeks for utopian residential design concepts in a world that is facing unprecedented challenges.