Grid Housing was the final project of my architecture degree: a deliberately academic and utopian proposal, not a startup deck in architectural form. It came out of urban analysis, housing typologies, and a question that felt increasingly unavoidable to me: what happens when the way people live in cities changes faster than the spaces built for them?
The project started from the mismatch I could see in global city centres. Many young people were sharing apartments designed for a conventional family with a fixed number of children, then improvising a different life inside them: temporary work, friendships, relationships, changing cities, and shared routines. The problem was not simply that the apartments were small. The underlying spatial model did not describe the lives being lived in them.
I treated London, Berlin, Paris, and New York as global urban nodes. Each is locally specific, but they are also connected through work, culture, study, and opportunity. In that sense, they often have a stronger relationship with one another than with their immediate surroundings. I wanted to push that condition to its limit and ask what sort of housing could belong to a person moving through that network rather than to one city alone.
The future I projected was intentionally extreme. Autonomous cars had made private car ownership irrelevant. Internet access and transport had become effectively free. Globalisation had intensified to the point that movement between these nodes was an ordinary part of life. Those assumptions were not forecasts. They were architectural devices: a way to remove constraints, exaggerate a tendency already visible at the time, and see what kind of city and domestic life emerged underneath.
The answer was a repeatable system of private domestic modules and shared infrastructure. It operated at two scales at once: a building designed for a new form of collective life, and a macro-plan capable of being repeated across different global nodes. I was interested in a housing typology that could grow as a connected structure, adapting the relationship between privacy, shared space, and mobility rather than treating them as separate problems.
This was a proposition made through architecture. Its value was in the structure of the question, the spatial system, and the freedom to be excessive enough to make the present visible. The later Grid Housing startup borrowed its starting point from this work, but it was a different project with a different task: to see whether one small part of that world could be translated into a product.