The Fabric of Ageing: Straw, Weaving, and Alternative Housing

This project proposes the conversion of an existing parking structure into a self-managed collective housing project for women over the age of 55. Beyond a conventional housing scheme, the architecture is conceived as a spatial framework that supports collective living, mutual care, and the transmission of knowledge. The project is inspired by the ethos of La Maison des Babayagas, which is grounded in principles of solidarity, autonomy, and civic engagement, and takes a clear political stance on ageing, gender, and the production of space.

At the centre of the project lies the use of wheat and straw, employed both as non-structural building materials and as carriers of embodied knowledge. Historically associated with domestic straw weaving practised by women, these materials are reintroduced as visible and valued elements of construction. Their collective maintenance and accepted ageing challenge dominant notions of durability, productivity, and performance, echoing the way ageing bodies are often perceived in contemporary society. Rather than treating fragility and transformation as failures, the project embraces them as architectural and social qualities.

Part of the site is transformed into a wheat field, producing a portion of the thatch and straw used for façade elements, woven panels, and interior walls. This cultivated ground establishes a direct connection between the building and its neighbourhood, while the productive cycle continues within the architecture itself. Wheat is dried on the roof and then moves downward through the building’s central core, where it is washed, cut, sorted, and woven. This vertical circulation of material makes visible the interdependence between domestic space, collective production, and everyday life, dissolving conventional separations between housing and work.

Woven elements function as spatial devices rather than simple finishes. Translucent straw panels form walls, thresholds, and filters, modulating light, acoustics, and privacy. Positioned at the entrance of each dwelling, they create graduated transitions between private units and shared circulation spaces, while allowing daylight to penetrate deep into the building. These circulation spaces are expanded and activated, becoming places for movement, encounter, and collective practices of care, such as bathing rituals and informal gatherings.

The fully glazed central core of the building concentrates shared programs including laundry areas, exercise spaces, meeting rooms, and weaving workshops. Its ventilated façade allows both laundry and wheat to dry, reinforcing the idea of the building as a living organism traversed by material and social flows.

Through this spatial and material continuity between production, habitation, and community life, the project articulates collective housing as an architectural and political tool—one that reintroduces care, temporality, and human scale into the contemporary city while resisting standardisation and urban speculation.

Project by: Léa Binggeli

Teaching team: Teaching team: Anna Puigjaner, Dafni Retzepi, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Pol Esteve Castelló, Lisa Maillard, He Shen, He Yufei. In collaboration with BUK.

Master Thesis: Autumn 2025

Images: Luís Úrculo