How we live: reconnecting architecture with sociological thinking

One of the most formative influences on my early interest in housing was not architecture itself, it was the work of Monique Eleb, a French psychologist and sociologist who specialised in domestic architecture. Her sociological lens, studying how people inhabit space, reflected how I wanted to think about design.

Eleb did not just look at buildings as static forms, but as evolving environments shaped by the people who lived in them. Her research on post-war housing and later state-funded residential developments highlighted that homes are not just built environments enabling basic functions, but living systems embedded in social, cultural and emotional contexts, in all their complexity.

In Urbanité, sociabilité et intimité: des logements d’aujourd’hui (1997) Monique Eleb and Anne Marie Chatelet observed how family structures shifted over time, how domestic rituals transformed with each generation, and how this was taken on board by architects and reflected in large-scale housing schemes in France.

This idea feels more urgent today than ever, and looking back through a book given to me by my first ever employer, it is of course nothing new. In How to Plan Your House from 1937, architect Martin S. Briggs reflected on how domestic architecture should respond to changing lifestyles.

Writing in the years after the First World War, he argued that shifts in habits across all social groups should be reflected in the houses people build for themselves:

“‘It is grand to own our house, Son,’ says a proud father on the posters of a certain building society, but how much grander if you have obtained exactly the kind of house that suits your own idiosyncrasies and your way of life! Yet though each of us has his own way of life, the habits of people in every stratum of society gradually change as a whole, and they have never changed more rapidly among the middle class than during the crowded years since the Great War. This particular change should be reflected in the new houses which people build for themselves, and it will be my endeavour in the following pages to question at every point the need for such modifications as have recently taken place in planning and design, as well as to keep an eye upon the future.”

As an interesting comparison, the design of the workplace has undergone a radical reinvention in recent decades. Offices that were not so long ago all about cubicles and fluorescent lighting (remember Working Girl?) are now focused on wellness, sustainability and flexibility. As a newbie at Barr Gazetas, I have been on a number of visits to newly developed offices recently and, surprisingly, have thought to myself: these are such nice places, I could almost live there.

It is worth asking why offices have evolved so dramatically, while housing has not.

Part of the answer may lie in the economy and dynamics of the workplace as a ‘real estate asset’ based on a 20-year redesign cycle, but also clearly in how workplace design has embraced the relationship between space and behaviour. It is also driven by businesses recognising that the quality of an environment affects productivity, wellbeing, collaboration and retention, and architects have responded with workplace designs that cater to diverse modes of working, including spaces for focus, rest, social interaction and movement. There is a curiosity, even a boldness, in how office space has adapted to the evolving rhythms of life and work.

New housing, by contrast, has been far slower to respond to social change. Much of today’s housing stock is still designed for a model of living that is based on the stable, two-parent household with children, living in a flat or house for decades.

Our job is not to fix life into neat floorplans, but to design frameworks that support change, diversity and possibility

A very relevant model, but today’s realities are far more diverse. People live alone, with friends, in multi-generational households, as carers, with chosen families, or in between cities and relationships. Yet we continue to design homes based on fixed categories rather than on flexibility and fluidity.

Sociologist Sonia Lavadinho speaks powerfully about this. At the ‘Housing Matters’ panel at MIPIM 2024, she described how our lives have evolved from linear trajectories: grow up, move out, pair off, settle down, to something much more fragmented and fluid. People live alone for longer, move between cities and countries more often, and form households in increasingly diverse ways, and, according to her, a person will have on average 10 years of his adult life in ‘in-between’ stages that would deserve different types of housing.

In this particular instance, Lavadinho argued for co-living as a typology that can address these shifts. Too often reduced to student-style flatshares, co-living actually offers a profound opportunity to rethink domestic space. When done well, it is not a compromise but a choice. It reflects the changing nature of work, relationships, affordability and belonging, whilst offering choice. In co-living, there is a rebalancing between privacy and community, individual needs and shared resources. Architecture has a central role in shaping these dynamics, it is not just about squeezing more people into less space, but about designing with intention and an understanding of social needs.

This is only one example, but I do think that engaging with sociology in much more of a normalised way should be an important driver to build the homes that we need. Too much housing still focuses solely on efficiency, marketability or regulatory compliance. While these are necessary, they miss something essential, the emotional and relational fabric of home life. How do we design for loneliness, for joy, for connection? How do we support ageing in place, or flexible living for young professionals who crave both autonomy and community?

That means working alongside sociologists, psychologists and urban researchers and returning to voices like Eleb and Lavadinho, who remind us that people do not simply occupy spaces. Our job is not to fix life into neat floorplans, but to design frameworks that support change, diversity and possibility.