Hotel for Artists in Residency.
Montmartre, Paris, France.
Group project with Naureen S Feroz at École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-La Villette.

The retreat for artists redefines hospitality by attempting to create a new spatial form by extending the existing urban relationships created in the topography of Montmartre. The experience of crossing narrow streets and encountering vibrant courtyards with bustling public activity (such as Place du Tertre) is abstracted into a spatial concept. The project imagines public spaces as successive courtyards and private rooms as modules floating in a radiating framework that rests on a more private ‘formed second ground’ with a free-flowing garden space. This imagination flips the organization of spaces in the existing typologies of hotel projects by creating public spaces at the core and opening up the private cabins to the views towards the streets and the urban landscape. The thin steel frames that radiate from the layered solid stone walls respond to the context by mimicking the shape of the existing urban morphology of the existing buildings around. The sequential journey from the street, to the multifunctional courtyards defined by solid walls of Parisian stone, to the winding stairways around the courts, and the floating cabins amidst the forest of thin frames; creates a diverse set of spatial experiences that are coherent in the larger narrative of the project.