Vaissnavi Shukl
Everytime I watched the movie Home Alone as a kid, I felt envious of Kevin McAllister and how he had such a gala time living alone. There were no restrictions, and he had all the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. That, of course, was a movie, and he was a kid, and he probably couldn’t have lived alone in real life, legally speaking, but he just happened to for a few days. There are a lot of people in this world who are increasingly making the conscious choice of living alone. And it just so turns out that the number of people living alone in Europe has doubled since the 1980s so with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we speak to architects Maria Vittorio Tessi and Flavio Martella about the social, economic and architectural implications of living alone.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Okay? Maria and Flavio, we are here today to talk about your work, specifically that you guys wrote on Future Architecture called ‘Living Alone’. And so before we get into the details of what living alone means, I want us to set the ground a little bit in terms of what or how we can differentiate “living alone” versus “loneliness”. We spoke about it the first time we talked. And I think early on, we should make that distinction about how maybe living alone is a choice, whereas loneliness, perhaps is a slightly more different condition. So let’s get started.

Flavio Martella
Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting us, and you start strong with the biggest question probably. Well you see, living alone is a choice, especially right now that we have more choices, more lifestyles that can accommodate our uses, and I don’t know the daily lives. Living alone is a choice, and we can or we cannot make i.t Loneliness instead is something that we can feel, even if we are surrounded by people. I mean, I can feel lonely if I am in a family. I can feel depressed if I am in a context full of friends, or alone in a context full of friends. So it’s not something that is just a choice. It’s probably a consequence of your background, of your context, of many factors, probably so they are not of course, they are intertwined. They are connected living alone and loneliness. Because if you are living alone, you can feel lonely, but probably you are chasing, chasing the loneliness, or you want to be alone in some parts of your daily routines, you need your break, for example, in the evening, after work, you need your space to just stay alone, to recover from the chaos of the daily life of work, study or whatever. Instead loneliness, it’s something that can happen in every circumstance. Well, if I continue, probably I will start to talk about living alone, but not just the question itself, but probably you can agree. Also know, what is loneliness and living alone?

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Yeah, more than loneliness and living alone, I was rereading again the book where you wrote your contribution one year ago, which is called ‘Loneliness and the Built Environment’. And there is this article wrote by Palllasmaa, who argues that solitude is different than loneliness, and he says that solitude is a positive way of being alone, while loneliness is kind of a negative condition, they are two different ways of being alone, and the main difference is between them is that solitude, it’s like voluntary condition, while loneliness it’s it’s not.

Flavio Martella
Yeah, living alone is just the architectural expression of solitude, probably. But we can also say that living alone and solitude are also a little bit different, because I can live alone but I’m also connected to the digital devices, or personal device devices. I’m also hyper connected, or hyper connected with a lot of people, a lot of friends, families, parents, also children, if you have it throughout your devices. So I’m physically alone, but not totally alone.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Okay, let us unpack that, because there’s some deep, deep stuff that Flavio just said. Okay, so first solitude… I never thought about it that solitude has a slightly more optimistic connotation, and loneliness doesn’t necessarily however. You could be living alone and you could be living in solitude, or you could be lonely. So that’s about the mental state of mine, living alone is a physical condition, but I think Flavio, what you just touched upon. I think it’s very important to unpack that, because in today’s day and age with social media and with hyper connectivity about almost everything in your life, even if you look at the way data is used, you could be living alone in a house where your data is not privy to just you, but your data is actually going in the hands of people you probably don’t want it to. In that sense, it’s kind of like it’s a paradoxical question: are you actually living alone if you are connected with other people? Does it really like, can we establish that living alone is boiling down to the physical condition and not really a social condition, because I was going to lead this into like historical origins of living alone that probably back in the day would have meant being socially exiled in some way or socially isolated, but in today’s day and age, then it just probably comes down to choice or circumstances. But you cannot necessarily be alone if you’re constantly on your phone, if you’re sharing life updates, if you’re showing everyone what you’re eating, how you’re living, you know what movie you’re watching? What do you think living alone then means in today’s day and age?

Flavio Martella
Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, it’s like that. We probably do especially, I think in developed country, we are not we are never alone. Basically, we are always in some way connected to something or to someone through a network of care or just simply a social network or network of some kind. But probably a lot of more people right now are searching or trying to live alone, or requesting to live alone just to take out some noise from deadlines. I don’t know. This is just my speculation, our speculation that we advance also in a paper. It’s not proven, I mean, but it’s something that I believe could be true, that we are so overcrowded, are so overwhelmed about all those noises that we receive, all those issues that we receive throughout the day by social media, by television, by radio, by podcast, by Spotify, songs or simply work, meeting, chats or whatever, that we need to take out something, and probably this something is the human contact after those situations. So it could be a possibility that we need a moment just to have more space for ourselves and a lot of people, actually. I mean, this is probably one of the most provocative explanation of why most people want to live alone right now in Europe and western countries, because I don’t know otherwise, it would be inexplicable, because also living alone is the most expensive living that we have right now. So it’s something that goes against our income, our lifestyle, our work, our jobs, our cities, also, because it’s way more expensive for the city.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, that’s, that’s actually what I wanted to get into. I thought we could probably look at the phenomenon of living alone through maybe, like, three lenses. So one of them, of course, is, is the economical lens? Right? Both from the person’s expenditure point of view, but then also maybe we could talk about the point of view. Second thing I wanted to talk about after this was the social implications, and how the trend in an increasing number of people living alone probably reflects a change in society, in family structures. And then in the end, I also want to talk to touch upon the public culture, or the public of living alone. You’ve made a lovely film on, you know, with vignettes of how that advertising and popular culture and film media. So let’s start with the first one. Let’s talk about, as you mentioned, it’s expensive to live alone. And as students, of course, whenever, you know, we go to grad school, or we’ve just started working. You want to share bills. We’re not necessarily like your roommates at all times, but economically, it’s a decision that one makes that, you know, you really want to split the bills. It’s easier on the pocket. You got to save a little more. But the two charts that you shared earlier, and maybe I’ll put it up somewhere, is that an increasing number of people who’ve chosen to live alone are actually concentrated in the Nordic parts of Europe. So you have a lot of people from Norway, Finland, Germany, Denmark, who, or most like it, percentage wise, most percentage of the population that lives alone is in these countries. Can you give a little bit of an insight into how that’s happening, what’s happening and how economically does one read into that?

Flavio Martella
First thing we have to say is that a lot of people right now, starting from the 80s, living alone, is something that is always more popular. It has gone through a very huge boom during those 40-50 years. It’s something that is happening basically everywhere. But as you said, in a Nordic country of Europe especially, it’s more frequent. I mean, we studied a little bit more Latin countries such as Italy, Spain or France, but we can easily say that in the Nordic countries, the culture is so different. For example, they leave home teaching to study abroad or just to study another city in another university. So for their like, culture is more common to just simply get out at the house. That in Latin countries such as Spain or Italy is not so common. I mean, if we can stay with the family to afford a little bit of expenses, or to avoid just living in a smaller apartment in a very big something, that we can actually do that in Italy or in Spain. So they have this different culture, and then they have bigger incomes and have a lot of financial helps by the state or the municipalities. So they are helped, and they are pushed also to live alone, to start an independent way of life is something that we are well, in a different culture. So we perceive that living alone is something that we can experience, but a little bit in advanced age. That’s why Nordic country, they have this huge boom that right now, I believe that it’s more that it’s above six 60% of the population that lives alone in those countries, just something that it’s huge.

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Yeah, 40%. Yeah, more than 40% of the people in northern countries like Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Japan, with a graph, a chart that shows the share of the one person household in these countries. And yeah, of course, the richest countries that have more people who live alone, go together with the incomes, with the wealthiness of the countries. It’s the same. You know, it’s a city.

Flavio Martella
Yeah, but for example, where we live, we are Italian. We were born in Rome, but we live in Madrid, and we have a lot of people so friends that actually or lives alone, or want to live alone in a city like Madrid, that is a very lovely city or with a lot of activities, and it’s more or less a 15 minute city, because around your place, you have at 15 minutes wall for biking, You have everything, basically so in a context like that, people doesn’t see a problem to live alone. Instead, they feel that they feel that they can live in those countries, or in those cities, such as Madrid, which is basically only related to income, to an economical issue, because Madrid is also a Latin or Southern Europe city, and the income is not so high. It’s not so powerful, I mean, to rent or buy a small house to live just by yourself. So a lot of people want to live alone, but they cannot because the state or the municipality doesn’t help to live alone, because it’s just not very profitable. I mean, it can be so profitable, but not so many people actually have money to develop.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Since you’re both practicing architects, and I know the nature of commission in your in a lot of European countries, is through competition and all the path breaking revolutionary housing projects have come out from from European countries now, as practicing you look at the kind of competitions that are floated for new housing, do you think this pattern of one person households reflects in the kind of competitions that are being floated for housing. What I’m trying to get at is, do you think the housing typology has evolved over time to accommodate all these people who want to live alone? Or do you think it’s, it’s a phenomenon that is happening nonetheless, but it’s not top down, being recognized by city governments or municipalities or even real estate developers.

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Yeah, most competitions are for family units housing, even if they are social housing. Rarely there is one unit for one pupil, for one person housing. That’s the problem. I mean, most of the time, my unit, one unit people housing, is modified later. You know it’s like you have big housing, you have to divide them to rent.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Unlike in the West, where you, you know already see, like studio apartments, you as part of like, same apartment complex, you would have one bedroom, two bedrooms, and then you would have studios, which, by default, the suits that it’s going to be one person. So just wondering if that’s something that comes down as a brief or is it then, as you said, modified later on.

Flavio Martella
Well, it depends. I mean, this is a very difficult matter, because it’s something that is not so regulated right now. It depends on the country, basically because, for example, in Denmark, they do have a normative legislation that actually speaks to people living alone. Actually authorize you to design something that starts with the studio apartment, a very small capsule or, well, capsule is too much, but I mean, for example, the latest example is the Bjark Ingels tower in Copenhagen, that is kind of brand new, and it’s a studio apartment tower. But for example, in Madrid, or even luxury?

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Yes, luxurious, of course, of course, luxury apartments.

Flavio Martella
Yeah, it’s small student apartments, but for rich people, because it’s very, very expensive. But well apart from there today, it’s always returning to the economical issue of living alone in the other countries, or Southern European countries, living alone by law, it’s very uncommon because it costs more square meter. I mean, if you live alone by law, for example, by Italian law, you need 45 square meters. We are, we are kind of posh. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Yeah, no. But Italian go actually, it’s very good for living or for residential units. It’s very comfortable. I mean, we must have huge bedroom kitchens and huge spaces, huge living areas. It’s very different, for example, from the Spanish. But returning to the Italian one to live alone, we need 45 square meters right now, or more or less, I mean, and to live in two, 72, I believe so, to design a house for two people, it costs less square meter than designing a house for one person. So basically, you need to talk about real estate management. You need to sell the single apartment, the house for a single person, at a cost per square meter, higher than an ounce for two, and way higher than an ounce for three, and way, way higher than an ounce for four. So that’s the bigger problem. So as Maria Vittoria was saying, a lot of studio apartments in Madrid in Rome came from remodeling or reinventing bigger apartments. I have a big apartment for four, and then I hire an architect to divide the apartments into three lesser apartments, or for lesser apartments, just to rent, well, more apartments, and then more money. Basically, this is the issue behind it. This is the trend right now. That’s the point. But actually they are, in some way, they are really very well in the situation, because a lot of people want to live alone, and want to have the possibility to live alone in a big city, because living alone is a trend that is happening, especially in bigger cities than in the countryside. And in the countryside, basically no one lives alone because they have bigger houses in different contexts and in the city, it’s happening, and it’s so frequent to want the will to live alone that they are basically reading very well the situation, such as also the product, the products and the market, at the global market, that is like pushing for people that doesn’t want to cook, that doesn’t want to spend time, like the normal, traditional Housing time, like cook, clean or taking care of something. I mean, they just sell services and products that don’t cook, to have a single meal prepared, to have, like, caring services to take care of, well, your pet, your kids, or, well what you have. And also cleaning the house. You don’t have to clean the house, because, if you don’t have a family or whatever to buy, you need a house every day. I mean, you can hire someone once a week, and that’s it. I

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Yeah, it’s like, it’s like, in the in the last 20 years, while we were doing the video for the living alone in future architecture platform, we like realized that the living alone lifestyle was kind of romanticized, maybe from the by TV series, by movies, by a bedtime, but then we actually keep on living in older spaces. It’s like we, as a woman, were saying in her book about the woman in the house, we live in spaces of yesterday. In a science fiction world, it’s like a paradox, because we keep on living in houses like, 60 years ago. But everything is moving on. Technology is moving on very fast. But how are our spaces, they are quite the same.

Flavio Martella
Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. If you think about, for example, the kitchen. I mean, the kitchen is something that is kind of controversial right now, because you need a kitchen, that’s the law. I mean, I have to design a house with a kitchen, and the kitchen is fine. But for example, annapoja, a very excellent researcher and professor and architect, researched very well. She did a very meaningful research about a kitchenless city. That’s because, basically, you have a lot of situations where you can find a kitchen, you can find an excellent city like Madrid, you can find a lot of restaurants that offer you a complete meal. I mean, first dish, second dish, a dessert and like a water drink with 10 or 11 euros. So it’s very, kind of very cheap. I mean, like McDonald’s cheap, it’s very, very cheap. So you can find every kind of situation, their kitchens or prepare meals, as I said before, they are very, very cheap. I mean, it’s so tasteful, probably, but they are improving also. So do you really need the traditional big kitchen with four fires, an oven, and a dishwasher? I mean, in Italy?

Flavio Martella
Yes, we need it. Yeah, we did an exposition in 2018. I believe it was in Italy. We started in Italy, then we wrote the exhibition, and I made this study about how much time do you spend actually doing Cal’s work, and how much time you can save by buying products. Just to show that right now, the market, the global market, is improving or is pushing this lifestyle. I don’t know if it’s something that is good or wrong, but it’s something that’s happening. And a lot of housewives, like 50 or 60 year old housewives. They say, Yeah, but you cannot live within a house without a kitchen. I mean, yeah, you cannot live in a house without a kitchen. I understand this, but probably I can. No, I cannot.

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Again, we can’t because we’re Italian and we have to cook.

Flavio Martella
Yeah, a lot of people that we know, and probably also you know, or probably you are one of them. You probably don’t need that kitchen. Actually, you need some part of the kitchen, that’s for sure. But you don’t need, probably, you, or, well, your friends, a very huge and fully applied kitchen. So it’s something that is controversial. You can save a lot of space. You can also try to understand how people are actually living today. Also, people that live alone today are something that is different, because living alone is not living in a family. I mean, I understand why in a family of four, for example, or five is cheaper and more convenient to prepare meals at home, because it’s some it’s something that will have to make it for one I will make it for five minutes the same time, but I will save a lot of money that way. But to live alone, I have to buy everything by one, and it will cost me a lot of money, a lot of time. Instead, I can just go down to the bar, to the restaurant and eat something or buy something that is cheaper, that is already made, or it’s full of services like those kitchens, or also in Spain, those grandmas that actually came to your house to cook. It’s that. It’s important that architecture learns about their well, it’s environment and its context to produce meaningful architectures, because reading the situation is very important right now, we cannot continue to propose the same old structure and designs that actually responded quite well to a situation that was from the 50s and the 60s, the 70s, probably. But starting from the 70s, changes were made. Revolution started. So we changed our lifestyles a lot, and living alone is a consequence of those two years.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So you did speak about culture a little bit here, because you said you’re Italian, so you need a kitchen. And I mean, I relate to it as Indians, we also need our kitchen. I don’t think a lot of people here can imagine living in a house without a kitchen. Now, I think this also gets into an area that I think we should talk about, and that is family as like a unit and as a large and since this is something that as a trend has doubled since the 70s or the 80s. What do you think of the idea of a family as a unit that stays together because you said a lot of houses are also family units? How do you think that notion of a family or occupants of this house has changed, and how do you think this trend reflects a changing society as a whole?

Flavio Martella
Well, I believe that living alone, it’s a consequence of many changes in society, depending on the country, depending on the historical period of those countries. But basically, living alone is possible right now, with those numbers, I mean because it was also possible before, for example, after the war, a lot of people lived alone because they didn’t have a husband, a husband or a wife, simply because of the war. So a lot of people had those consequences of an historical period. But right now in any kind of situation, living alone is derived basically from gender revolution and a digital revolution in some way, one that is more social and the other one technological. But they had the same influence, basically the same importance, in configuring different lifestyles. Because, starting from the 70s, the traditional familiar nucleus nucleus. It’s not just the only one that can exist. I mean, women took power, or started to power, and simply going out of the house or going out of the applied role of housewives, they started creating different possibilities inside the social roles. And after, together with the digital revolution that connects people, and as we said at the beginning, intertwined every every aspects of our of our life, and also interconnects each other, of us basically through zoom or social network or whatever, they create a different layer, this, in some way, just opposed to our material layer, and it made it, I Don’t know if more complex, but clearly different, clearly different. We are always in touch with someone, so we don’t need a direct contact, or a physical contact with a person. And then we have in our mind this concept that we can live in a different model thanks to the gender revolution, that we can live in a different models than the traditional family, and then, well, without entering in these other huge arguments, it started well, a lot of other lifestyles that is not just living alone, but our other kind of other group, or living group, societal living group, or a lot of situations that were not simply, in some way predicted by law during the 50s and the 60s in the 70s. Funny is that architecture just follows the same old principle. So from the 50s and the 60s, in some way, the houses didn’t change so much, at least in Europe. Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And since you have made that film, and I think I want to bring it to popular culture now, you’ve kind of curated a wonderful set of vignettes, instances, clips about how this idea, or this lifestyle of living alone has been even portrayed in popular culture. What do you think we go from here now in if you were to push the boundaries and extrapolate the trend and speculate into what the future looks like,

Maria Vittoria Tesei
Well, it’s funny, For the first time, actually I was watching Sex and the City and I was thinking a lot about this kind of topic, because they kind of sell a romanticized view of these women living alone in New York, but they are actually most of them are broke, you know, and it’s like they can’t afford, clearly, to live in the apartments where they where they live, so I don’t know now, maybe in the in the last TV series and and the last movies that we are, that they are showing us, also in Netflix and stuff like that, maybe the trend is changing, and it’s like cooler to to live, also with other people, starts to be, to be also showcasing this kind of new, new living, new forms of living. Yeah, yeah. For example, I don’t know, New Girl, they, they kind of, they kind of share the flat so, I don’t know. Sometimes we have the wrong examples, and sometimes it’s like, you know, I don’t know. You can empathize more with this kind of reference, references of pop culture. Well,

Flavio Martella
I think something that should be important is to recognize what is happening. I mean, we don’t live alone, because we are a couple, me and Maria Victoria, but it’s something that is happening to a huge percentage of the population, at least in Western countries and Europe and even in Japan. But we didn’t say much about the Japanese situation. So it’s something that it’s hitting a huge part of the creation. So it’s something that we have to recognize that is happening, even though, right now, of course, there are TV series or movies or whatever that are showing other lifestyles, but it was always happening that way. I mean the other part of the population, actually, still lives in the most traditional kind of lifestyle. So it’s normal that the 60s, the 60% or 70% of the population, and also the production, the cinematic production, respond to the other part of the population that the 30th still is living alone, for example, if you want to talk about pop up pop culture, Emily Paris, that was like a huge mainstream TV series at least a couple of years ago. She lived alone in Paris, in probably the most expensive city in Europe. She had a wonderful job, of course, yeah, but she lived alone in Paris, and it is the dream, I believe, of everyone not sharing a very small flat in Paris. That is the actual situation. Paris. In the center, yeah, in the center, the city center, anarchy Paris, and you live alone in Paris, and you are happy, yeah, of course, me too. I mean, so the first step, I mean, in the future, I think could be the recognizing of living alone by the people that I believe it’s already recognizing living alone, such as a possible lifestyle or a possible choice, but by the law, by the state, by the municipality, that living alone is something that should happen In the city. I mean, a city should offer something that responds to this demand and also help the people that want to live alone in some way, to regulate the situation or to create a protected kind of norm for those who want to live alone.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s a fabulous way to wrap it down. Flavio and Maria, thank you so much for your time and for actually even thinking about studying something like this, like until we came across your article, I had no idea you could really look at a phenomena of living alone and that could be studied in such depth, and there are so many dimensions to it. So thank you so much.

Flavio Martella
Thank you for inviting us.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.