Espaces de l'habiter #12 - Catherine Sabbah, Executive Director of IDHEAL: “The Interconnected Home: In/Out—Does Form Follow Function?”

Our homes are the setting for our lives. As such, they serve functions that have, over time, come and gone: birth, work, education, health, household chores, feeding, cleaning, leisure, sports, consumption, illness, death… These functions have had—or still have—spaces designed to varying degrees for these activities and dedicated to them, or else they have disappeared as the functions have been relocated elsewhere—to the office, school, or hospital—or transferred to screens.
What comes in and what goes out of a home that is traversed—and is therefore also a place through which things pass? Must the space adapt, and how? And on top of these very slow flows, there are the faster, daily flows of water, light, energy, waste, and of us as we enter, stay, and leave…
  

Biographical Notes
From the city to the home, from the most communal to the most intimate, Catherine Sabbah analyzes the mechanisms behind the creation of lived spaces. She worked as a journalist at Les Échos for ten years and for numerous other newspapers. She ran the blog “La République de l’Architecture,” chaired the Association of Housing and Urban Journalists (Ajibat), and worked for the German Marshall Fund on smart cities in the United States and France. In 2019, she curated the “Hôtel Métropole” exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. After spending much of her career telling other people’s stories, she founded IDHEAL (Institut des Hautes Études pour l’Action dans le Logement) to take action.