Design Thesis: The Corridor’s Role In a Post-Pandemic World

The corridor is often overlooked and minimised in today’s mass-residential architecture projects as a non-profitable area to project developers. I believe it is an underutilised tool in all mass residential housing to help social interaction and promote community between residents. However, since the corridor’s conception, it has taken on many approaches to social interaction. Conceived as a tool in the 14th century to minimise interaction between servants and their masters and eventually progressing to proactively encourage interaction in 19th-century Soviet modernism ideas of the Social Condenser (included in the brief of my design thesis).

After the current pandemic ends, the spatial interaction requirements between residents are predicted to have been permanently changed. We will require our mass-residential architecture to provide a more robust community experience than ever before, while simultaneously allowing for social shielding for the vulnerable. My aim in my design thesis is to investigate the corridor’s potential to be an instrument for social interaction and avoidance in a post-Covid-19 World.

One of the tools I used to develop within my design thesis and research practices is the research artefact production method called Giga-Montaging, which allows me to visually prototype different scenarios within my developing system orientation design. These five examples of Giga-montage deal with varying investigation lines developed through my system orientated design including posthuman narratives, social condenser, rewilding and post-pandemic social interaction. Although the produced Giga-Montage artefacts are diverse in appearance, their goal is to encourage collaboration and diversify my knowledge of a proposal’s wicked problem, allowing me to make a more informed design output in the next stage of my design thesis.