The Inhabited Edge
What if the façade was not the end of the apartment, but another room?
In much of contemporary housing, the façade is treated as a boundary. Inside is conditioned space. Outside is weather. Somewhere between the two sits a balcony, often reduced to the minimum depth required to make an apartment plan look more generous.
In a Mediterranean climate, this seems like a missed opportunity.
For a large part of the year, life does not need to happen entirely indoors. Meals move outside. Doors remain open. Shade matters more than enclosure. A few degrees of temperature, a breeze, a tree or a deep overhang can determine whether a space is pleasant or unusable.
This changes how we think about the edge of a building.
Rather than drawing a thin line between interior and exterior, we are interested in making that line thick enough to inhabit.
A room between inside and outside
Corte Podvare, a housing project in Sukošan on the Croatian coast, began with a fairly ordinary set of constraints: a relatively dense residential programme, two compact buildings, limited land, parking requirements and the need for privacy between apartments.
The question was not how to disguise those constraints.
It was how to make them produce architecture.
The apartments are therefore organised around a compact interior and a much deeper outer layer: terraces, loggias, planting, shade and structural elements that together form an inhabited edge.
This space is neither fully inside nor fully outside.
It is a seasonal room.
In winter, the apartment contracts towards its insulated interior. In spring and autumn, the boundary almost disappears. In summer, when direct sunlight is something to avoid rather than celebrate, the shaded outer zone becomes one of the main living spaces of the home.
The usable territory of the apartment changes through the year without adding conditioned floor area.
That seems particularly relevant in a climate where cooling demand is increasing and where the conventional response is still often more glass followed by more air conditioning.
Climate before technology
The inhabited edge is first of all a climatic device.
Its depth protects glazing from high summer sun. Vegetation provides additional shade and evaporative cooling. Open sides allow air to move through the space. Planters become part of the environmental system rather than decoration applied to the elevation afterwards.
This does not eliminate technical systems, nor should architecture pretend that it can.
But it changes the order of operations.
Before asking a machine to correct the climate, the building itself should do some of the work.
Orientation, depth, shade, vegetation, thermal mass and natural ventilation are old tools. Their relevance has not diminished because we now have heat pumps.
If anything, they matter more.
The aim is not a façade that looks green in a rendering. The aim is a façade whose geometry, planting and construction measurably improve the conditions around the apartment.
For that to happen, vegetation needs soil, water and maintenance. Shade needs the right depth. Drainage has to be resolved. Plants need to survive August rather than a presentation board.
Architecture becomes less photogenic for a moment and more useful. A fair trade.
Privacy without withdrawal
Density creates another problem.
On many coastal developments, privacy is solved by turning apartments away from one another, raising walls or covering façades with screens. The result is often a strange contradiction: buildings are placed close together to maximise the site, then enormous effort is spent pretending the neighbours are not there.
At Corte Podvare, the outer layer acts as a spatial filter.
Planting, depth, columns, screens and changing levels of transparency make it possible to see the sky, landscape and garden without exposing every interior directly to another apartment.
Privacy does not require complete separation.
It can be produced through distance, oblique views, shadow and layers.
This interests us because it allows housing to remain open while still giving residents control over how much they reveal.
The façade is therefore not an image. It negotiates relationships.
Two buildings, one room
The same idea extends beyond the individual apartment.
Corte Podvare consists of two compact residential volumes, but we do not see the space between them as leftover landscape.
It is the centre of the project.
The two buildings define a shared courtyard, a corte, that acts as an outdoor room for the small residential community.
Arrival is organised around it. Paths cross it. Entrances address it. Planting gives shade rather than filling residual corners. The relationship between the apartments and the courtyard is deliberately gradual.
Street.
Threshold.
Shared garden.
Semi-private edge.
Home.
These transitions matter.
Housing becomes poorer when every square metre is classified immediately as either private or public. Some of the most useful spaces are ambiguous: the bench outside an entrance, the shaded threshold where somebody pauses, the garden edge that belongs to everyone and no one in particular.
They create the possibility of contact without demanding it.
Good collective space is not a programme of forced social interaction. People should be allowed to ignore their neighbours perfectly comfortably.
It simply gives everyday life somewhere to happen.
Removing the car from the centre
This also affects parking.
On small residential sites, cars can easily become the real urban planners. Their turning radii, access routes and parking spaces consume the ground floor long before architecture gets involved.
The usual result is predictable: buildings surrounded by asphalt with landscaped fragments filling whatever remains.
In Corte Podvare, parking is pushed towards the perimeter and incorporated into shaded structures and planting.
The centre is kept for people and vegetation.
It is a small decision when viewed on a site plan, but a large one in daily use.
The space between the buildings can then become a garden rather than a traffic surface.
For housing on the Adriatic coast, where land is expensive and development pressure intense, this distinction matters.
Density does not have to mean that every unbuilt square metre becomes infrastructure.
A structure that can change
We also see the inhabited edge as something that should be able to change over time.
The insulated building is relatively permanent. The layer around it can be more adaptable.
Screens can change. Planting grows. Pergolas can be repaired or replaced. Different households will use the terraces differently. Over time, vegetation may become more visually dominant than the architecture supporting it.
This is intentional.
Buildings do not need to look finished on the day the photographer arrives.
There is something attractive about architecture that allows time to improve it.
A young building may be mostly structure and shadow. Five years later, plants begin to occupy it. Fifteen years later, the distinction between constructed frame and garden becomes less clear.
The architecture provides the framework.
Life completes it.
More than a balcony
None of these ideas are individually new.
Courtyards, loggias, pergolas, deep façades and shaded outdoor rooms belong to a very long history of building in warm climates.
The question is not how to imitate traditional Mediterranean architecture.
It is how to understand the intelligence behind it and apply that intelligence to contemporary housing.
Corte Podvare does not need stone walls, shutters or picturesque references to appear local.
Its relationship to place can come from something more fundamental: how it deals with sun, shade, vegetation, privacy, seasonal life and shared ground.
For us, this is what the inhabited edge is about.
Not making balconies larger.
Not covering a building in plants.
And not dissolving architecture into landscape.
It is about recognising that the boundary of a home can have thickness.
And that sometimes the most useful part of a building is neither completely inside nor completely outside.