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stabilizes a specific image of the surrounding town; this im-
age is dominated by the views that open up from our home,
so that a change of residence within the same town endows it
with a different countenance.- While in modernity, it was the public sphere within
which the individual develops, current trends towards the
increasing valuation of privacy mean that we are only truly
ourselves when we are at home. A residence, then, is not only
a place of retreat, a protected space of relaxation vis-à-vis the
impositions of social demands but also the realm of devel-
opment of the personal sphere. Here too, architecture must
create the necessary conditions. A residence, for example,
must be more than a hiding place: it must provide freedom
of movement. The plan in particular articulates both individ-
ual patterns of behaviour as well as social life. The standard
spatial programme involving living room, bedroom, kitchen
and bathroom has long since ceased to do justice to all of
the relevant demands, and often proves excessively constrict-
ing. Heinrich Zille believed that one could slay an individual
just as readily with an apartment as with an axe; undeniably,
the architecture of the residence intervenes massively into our
routine activities, facilitating, hindering or guiding the proc-
esses of daily life. Through his architecture, Le Corbusier, for
example, not only propagated a new architecture, but also
new forms of occupancy and new lifestyles. If a residence is
to promote the development of an inhabitant’s identity, the
architecture must give him or her leeway for appropriation
rather than restricting each room’s function. The necessary
architectural basis involves not simply more multipurpose
rooms, but instead a characteristic spatial structure that of-
fers the stage for intervention, for projections and traces of
individual life. Incisively designed residential architecture that
offers openness for individual appropriation as well provides
the > capacity for personal ideas and forms of occupancy to
accumulate and become invested with meaning. Greater lati-
tude for forms of self-presentation is offered by the > furnish-