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.

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