EnVol (Reliefs and Habitable Furniture)
EnVol — Living Bigger
From Living Room to Living Landscape
Developed by Arkhenspaces since 2016, EnVol — a French play on words meaning both “flight” and “in volume” — explores new ways of inhabiting space by fully exploiting its third dimension.
Through inhabited reliefs, Relief Furniture and Habitable Furniture, this research seeks to increase the habitability of existing places — housing, offices, hotels, residences, public facilities and hybrid environments — by diversifying uses, atmospheres and situations without increasing built floor area.
The project questions the transition from m² to m³, and then to n-spaces, in order to imagine environments that are richer, more adaptable and more stimulating.
The videos and text below present an experiment carried out within a dwelling designed according to these principles and tested daily during the 2020 lockdown.
[01] View from the Ground (video locations and additional videos at the end of the article)
This place, this home is also a practical implementation and a self-experimentation of part of our research on ar(t)chitecture.
Ar(t)chitecture as a way to improve, multiply and enlarge living space — extending distances, reaching ceilings and opening reliefs — while creating memories, traces and new possibilities capable of better responding to needs and desires.
A way of producing a new interior landscape.
[03] View from the Ground (video locations and additional videos at the end of the article)
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This text was notably published in Chroniques d’Architecture, as part of the collective exhibition And What Do We Do Tomorrow? at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and by Culture, Art and Psychoanalysis.
Lockdown: Aspiration to EnVol
Lockdown: keeping a living being (animal or plant) within a restricted and enclosed volume. So where can we find space? The answer lies partly within the definition itself: by making better use of volume.
This is an opportunity to introduce EnVol, an architectural concept developed by Arkhenspaces in 2016 and continuously refined ever since. In French, EnVol evokes both the idea of flight and inhabiting in volume, suggesting an architecture that expands possibilities by elevating the body, diversifying perspectives and revealing new landscapes within everyday space.
Beyond Square Metres
Thinking in n-spaces (multi-dimensional environments) means thinking about all dimensions of space and therefore, first and foremost, thinking in volume.
Architectural thinking is generally expressed through drawings and plans. Yet this language is not architecture itself; it is merely its score, a representation with its own codes, line weights, typologies and meanings.
Volume has traditionally been represented through two-dimensional drawings: plans, sections and elevations. The section remains my preferred drawing because it reveals space and volume. The section of a museum, a library or any significant building speaks for itself because it often reveals an unusual spatial condition.
By contrast, the sections of contemporary housing and office buildings are remarkably poor. Ceiling heights are almost always predetermined and therefore no longer questioned. They have become imposed standards. Housing is expected to have one ceiling height (2.50 m), offices another (3 to 3.30 m). These supposedly optimal values become almost immutable, leading to standardisation, normalisation, poverty and boredom.
The resilience of a system lies in its diversity. A system that performs well in one context may prove ineffective in another.
Increasing height is neither a loss nor an unnecessary luxury. First, it multiplies layers of air. More importantly, when intelligently used, it becomes an opportunity.
I have always been surprised by the obsession with the cost-per-square-metre ratio. This measurement unconsciously limits certain forms of research because it implies that a space — particularly housing or offices, leaving monuments aside — can be judged through a single value.
There is a cost per square metre; I buy square metres; I rent square metres. This becomes the primary comparison tool — an extreme simplification used to assess both construction costs and market value.
What a pity to reduce our environments to such a narrow metric.
Living Bigger
In some countries, property is sold in cubic metres rather than square metres, which is already an improvement.
But in the age of n-spaces, should we not also consider m⁴ (or m².h), m⁵, m⁶ and beyond?
Returning to the transition from m² to m³, this period of lockdown, during which we became acutely aware of every parcel of air surrounding us, should encourage us to reconsider the importance of volume.
The new concept of living space called EnVol questions the habitability of our environments. It can be implemented in both new and existing buildings through Relief Furniture and Habitable Furniture, conceived as a way of increasing the habitability of urban dwellings where ceiling heights remain generous.
A raw experiment was carried out in my own home: a small house in the centre of a medium-sized town.
Confined there for several weeks, I had the opportunity to experience it full-time.
The results exceeded my expectations—not in the way I personally used it (as an architect, I enjoy exploring space from every possible angle), but in the way my family and I appropriated it together on a daily basis.
It allows us to live close to one another while retaining the possibility, whenever we wish, of inhabiting our own separate worlds.
The diversity of atmospheres and degrees of separation emerge here through architectural principles far richer than a simple partition wall.
The space offers new viewpoints, transforming our relationships with one another.
This approach invites us to reconsider height.
Claude Parent had already explored many of these ideas. I sought to continue and extend them.
The oblique is remarkable because it invites the body to sit, lean and occupy space differently. It is also what makes the piazza in front of the Centre Pompidou, inspired by Siena, so lively.
It transforms relationships: the smallest person can suddenly become taller than the tallest.
New relationships emerge between the body, space and others.
My daughter, for instance, can literally look down on me.
From living room to living landscape
This new approach shifts our perceptions and transforms the way we relate to one another.
Sitting in the upper corner of a room to read generates a very different sensation: like a cat, one overlooks the space while remaining hidden and relatively inaccessible.
The number of accessible heights increases, whether seated or standing.
Each surface accommodates multiple uses: seating, circulation, storage, workspaces, observation points or pathways.
A step becomes a chair, a bench becomes a lookout, a shelf becomes a staircase, a slope becomes a deckchair.
A different bodily—almost physical—relationship with matter emerges, suggesting new postures and encouraging movement.
Here is the plan of the space.
The ceiling height reaches 2.90 m, while the floor area is only 29 m² (and even less under French Carrez regulations).
Yet an entire interior geography emerges with more than ten identifiable places: the table, the summit, the slope, the cabin, the plateaus, the perched desk, the buttresses, the steps and the threshold.
Nearly twenty different seating positions become possible, together with multiple accessible heights and a broad variety of atmospheres—hidden, elevated, intimate or open.
A better use of volume multiplies configurations, viewpoints, perceptions and interactions.
These practical experiments allow us to test and refine the ideas previously developed through the EnVol concept.
The benefits are numerous.
They revive the charm of attic spaces, improve living together, enhance the body’s biomechanical well-being and allow people to inhabit places that feel much larger and more diverse without increasing floor area.
I would like to invite you into my home, but that is not so simple.
Instead, you will find here a series of one-minute sequence-shot videos produced during a long lockdown weekend.
Presented almost like silent films or a miniature theatre, they offer a playful way of discovering these investigations through different postures, spaces, configurations and possible uses.
Eric Cassar, 2020
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Videos location
[02] View from the ground
[05] View from the eyrie
[06] View from the high plateau
[07] View from the slope
[09] View from the central plateau
[10] View from the rift
[12] View from the terrace
[13] View from the eyrie
[14] View from the peak
[15] View from the cabin
[18] View from the ground
[20] View from the table
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Design & architecture : Arkhenspaces (2017-2018)
Arkhenspaces team : Eric Cassar, Iker German
Carpenter : Carlos Toro
Video (2020 during lockdown) : Eric Cassar
Living bigger means multiplying possibilities without building more.
These explorations continue today through the development of active buildings, inhabited landscapes and hybrid environments.
They open perspectives and applications that are only partially presented here.