Interlocking: The Phenomenological Apartment

New Zealand faces the need for more housing over the coming decades due to increasing population and a decreasing household size. An existing response is a trend of higher density apartment buildings within our inner cities. However these small standardized apartments have created a negative view toward urban apartments, commonly being described as ‘shoe-boxes’. Can urban inner-city higher density housing be better designed? This becomes the focus of this research in regards to quality of space in small apartments. A critique of existing ‘shoe-box’ apartments is developed, proving they lack spatial quality, have lost a crucial connection with the dweller and are largely irrelevant to their site. The research seeks to remedy the ‘shoe-box’ apartment by applying principles from the theory of phenomenology and an interlocking typology. Phenomenology is introduced as a key theory to help develop a grounding in specificity and re-instill the notion of bodily experience in space. This theoretical position, based on Steven Holl’s architectural interpretation of phenomenology, with a bodily emphasis, is applied through four strategies to integrate a spatial experience. Typologically, interlocking apartments provide a precedent, where by their very nature, the interlocking produces an interesting relationship between spaces. This precedent analysis provides seven techniques which are coupled with the strategies from Holl, and applied to the design. The resulting design is a successful mixed-use urban solution, with a focus on the outcome of interlocking apartments.