Curtains on Curving Tracks Keep This Geneva Apartment’s Interiors Fluid

January 18, 2024

Curtains on Curving Tracks Keep This Geneva Apartment’s Interiors Fluid

The plywood- and tile-clad spaces can be reshaped by repositioning the fabric for privacy or openness.

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Project Details:

Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Architect: Bureau / @daniel_zamarbide

Footprint: 1,290 square feet

Photographer: Dylan Perrenoud

From the Architect: "In the case of this apartment, a former dentist office, the attempt is to welcome that 'flux' and stay open, to keep the possibilities of spatial evolution exposed to what might happen in time. The small building was designed for a mix use of modest artist’s studios, commercial and living spaces in the early 1980s. The space is structurally free, letting the light in through two transversal skylights, perpendicular to the north-oriented openings.

"The very idea of openness translates into a physical experience as not much is walled. Spaces, confinement, and the feeling of gentle enclosures are defined by other means other than partitions. Informed and inspired by the great work of Lilly, the architecture of curtains primarily takes care of the organization of the spaces. Curtains and glazed surfaces arrange the possibilities of perceiving and impeding, opening, closing and other in between situations. The full house becomes a sort of perceptive shifting machine as textiles, furniture, and light unfold at ease, provoking different situations, visual and experiential. The domestic material experience is mainly wrapped up in industrial wood panels, obsessively used floors and necessary partitions. Furniture, objects, carpets built-in elements, are dealt with as if everything was alive, less as a gesamtkunstwerk than as a dynamic theater stage without spectators where everything is part of a relation, a conversation, moving and displacing around at any moment. The possibility of disorder is present at all times."