Xingtao Li & Zizhuo Mao
2025
This thesis reimagines the boundaries between public and private life through a critical housing prototype. Rejecting defensive spatial conventions and manual adjustability, the project draws on Louis Kahn’s notion of inhabiting the wall to explore how architecture can generate proximity instead of separation. Walls are expanded into spatial thresholds—hosting backstage retreats, communal kitchens, and intimate transitional zones. These thickened partitions do not divide but host, offering a new domestic grammar where privacy and collectivity are negotiated through form. By transforming barriers into shared frameworks for life, the project proposes a hopeful spatial language for living together.