Casa MAC by So & So Studio UG; Italy

The first step in the design was to orient the spaces around a singular corridor spine, minimizing any potential maze effect and ensure efficient movement throughout the house. At the three main points of the central path, the entrances are located, giving access from the garage, the front door and the back patio. The central hallway connects the two main spaces, the bedroom and kitchen, through the entire house, with nodes along the way for the guest room, bathroom and living room.

Within the house, So & So worked directly with the client to map out her daily habits and typical path. This ensured an intuitive organization of the home and helped to ease the transition of daily activities between her two houses; old and new. Each daily use or activity became a node in So & So’s house map. They then invented and incorporated a language within the floor pattern to communicate their design decisions to the client for physical use. This process began first in the way they explained their ideas to the client. So & So continued to use the digital world to work and design, but utilized the physical world in model form as a tool for communicating any changes to the layout with the client.

What makes this project one-of-a-kind?

Designing a smart space, both elegant and intuitive was the intent in So & So Studio’s recently completed home for a blind woman in Thiene, Italy. When their client was ready for what she called “home” for fifty-five years to change, the designers elected to implement a natural process of adjustment and wayfinding for the vision impaired woman to navigate her new space.

For a blind homeowner, the process of learning a new environment is vital to not only the function of the space but for the daily life within that home. So from day one, the overarching theme of the project grew out of a simple glyphic language. Realized through thorough material selections of stone and porcelain, So & So Studio aimed to find the perfect balance of textures to guide the end user of the home between program elements using an embedded map system.

About the authors

So & So Studio UG is an anonymous design practice: an expert team of designers, makers, programmers and friends in Berlin, Germany.

So & So Studio has surfaced as a natural response to calls for observation, research and understanding, proposition, and smart solutions to design challenges considered unique.

As we continue to expand our architectural concepts through active projects, we also continue to critique the built and unbuilt environment around us. There is a playful nature in our approach to the world. Our process is fun, iterative and at times inappropriate. Within our exercises, the outcome is certainly a by-product of our dedicated approach to elegant solutions.

We take pride in considering and empowering the individuality of each project first, understanding its greater impact, then injecting it with playful, inventive strategies and exploration. Amidst our experiments, we often collaborate with engineers and artisans, creating collective relationships in which we always encompass cultural, ecological, economic and historical perspective to every solution.

The work of So & So Studio UG ranges in scale and focus from architectural design through urban discourse, product design and art installations. No matter the scale or focus of each work, we desire and demand to connect today’s relevance in architectural thinking to the people that are occupying our spaces.

Text provided by the authors of the project.