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Even the word carries movement inside it: corridor comes through Italian corridore, linked to correre, \u2018to run.\u2019 A strip of space devoted almost entirely to getting from one place to another seems simple now. At the time, it changed what a room could be.<\/p>\n
![\"architecture](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/villa-thiene-designboom-01.jpg\")
Villa Thiene, Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, Italy, 16th-century<\/p>\n
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privacy arrived with another route through the house<\/p>\n
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Once movement could be pulled out of occupied rooms, the plan could begin separating one kind of presence from another. A household member could remain in a parlor while someone crossed the building through a passage nearby.<\/p>\n
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By the nineteenth century, wealthy houses developed parallel systems of circulation, with back stairs and service passages moving domestic workers around the edges of family spaces. Rooms could be supplied with reduced encounters, meaning privacy could be produced in plan.<\/p>\n
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Even though the class structure behind those houses is specific, the spatial idea crossed over into middle-class houses and even apartments. Utility rooms absorbed recurring household tasks, and rear entrances created another way for groceries or deliveries to enter.<\/p>\n
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The people performing domestic work changed, and in many homes the resident took on work once assigned to staff. Still, the floor plan kept many of the same habits.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n what happens when the corridor becomes the room<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n MOS Architects turned that inherited logic inside out with House No. 11, or Corridor House, built for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2015. The installation is assembled from narrow modules based roughly on the dimensions of a conventional corridor and a sheet of plywood. A bed appears inside one. A desk occupies another.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The passage, usually treated as the neutral leftover between destinations, becomes the destination itself. MOS described the corridor as a device that made architecture increasingly concerned with circulation, with getting people and goods from one place to another faster. Their house occupies that circuitry and asks what happens when the supposedly empty strip acquires a life of its own.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Taku Sakaushi and OFDA\u2019s Three Corridors House<\/a> in Japan approaches the same question through a lived domestic plan. A long central hallway crosses the single-story house, while slimmer passages along the north and south edges double as verandas. Bathrooms and storage settle into the areas created between them. Study space appears there too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Circulation becomes a framework that organizes the entire interior, yet those corridors are wide enough and exposed enough to acquire other uses. The project makes visible a strange fact about the conventional hallway: a space developed to prevent interruption can become one of the most social parts of a house once architecture stops treating it as wasted area.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n the laundry room escapes the back of the plan<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Some of the clearest examples appear in spaces associated with maintenance. In Fala Atelier<\/a>\u2019s House Within Three Gestures<\/a> in Gondomar, Portugal, the laundry room breaks away from the main volume and rises into a small tower. It\u2019s an unuaual move, but it\u2019s also a revealing one.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n While laundry usually gets tucked behind a door or squeezed into a closet, here it\u2019s one of the house\u2019s most work-oriented rooms and changes the silhouette of the whole building. A function that architecture has spent centuries pushing toward the edge suddenly gets its own vertical figure.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n contemporary houses still have a back of house<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Mesura<\/a>\u2019s Vasto Gallery<\/a> in Barcelona makes this dependency easy to read. The converted industrial apartment is organized around a freestanding wooden service core, detached from the surrounding walls and ceiling. An eight-meter stainless-steel kitchen counter stretches openly through the main room, while private functions gather around the central volume.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The old hierarchy between front room and service room becomes harder to maintain when both are treated as major spatial elements. The mechanisms of living sit in plain sight.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A-01\u2019s No Footprint House<\/a> in Costa Rica compresses domestic systems into one central service core, leaving the plan open around it. Utilities gather at the center while the rest of the house remains adaptable. It is a contemporary version of an old architectural instinct: collect the work somewhere specific so the surrounding space can feel free.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Here, this work extends to energy and climate control as much as it does cleaning or cooking. Domestic labor has expanded into building services, and architecture still gives those services their own territory.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n the ordinary plan is full of architectural fossils<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Look again at an ordinary house and these divisions start to appear everywhere. The hallway lets one person cross the home without crossing another person\u2019s room. The laundry closet contains a repeating cycle of work behind two doors. A garage entrance receives shoes and bags before they travel farther inside.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Even the mechanical cupboard is a tiny sealed room devoted to the systems that make every other room comfortable. These spaces rarely define how a home is described, although the home would struggle to function without them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The interesting part is how long these arrangements survive after their original social conditions shift. A corridor that once helped separate servants from employers becomes the hallway in a two-bedroom apartment. A service zone becomes the utility core of an experimental house, and a laundry room becomes a tower. Architecture keeps old behaviors longer than we tend to realize.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This article is part of designboom\u2019s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"the house learned how to hide movement \u00a0 Most houses have a room whose only purpose is to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":846220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,343811],"class_list":["post-846219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-modes-of-habitation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"architecture](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/casa-rh-corredor-plus-modulo-lucas-maino-fernandez-designboom-01.jpg\")
RH House, Lucas Maino Fernandez<\/a>, Valdivia, Chile, 2021 | image \u00a9 Marcos Zegers<\/p>\n![\"architecture](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/chicago-architecture-biennial-2015-MOS-architects-no.11-corridor-house-designboom-01.jpg\"\/)
House no.11 (Corridor House)\u2019, MOS architects<\/a>, Chicago Architecture Biennial<\/a>, 2015 | image \u00a9 designboom<\/p>\n![\"architecture](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/imgi_32_three01.jpeg\")
Three Corridors House, Taku Sakaushi \/ OFDA<\/a>, Japan, 2011 | image courtesy Taku Sakaushi \/ OFDA<\/p>\n![\"architecture](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/fala-atelier-house-118-porto-portugal-designboom-01.jpg\")
House Within Three Gestures, Fala Atelier<\/a>, Gondomar, Portugal, 2023 | image \u00a9 Francisco Ascensao<\/a><\/p>\n![\"mesura](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/mesura-architecture-vasto-gallery-designboom-03.jpg\")
Vasto Gallery, Mesura<\/a>, Barcelona, Spain, 2023 | image \u00a9\u00a0Salva L\u00f3pez<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A-01](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/no-footprint-house-A-01-costa-rica-fernando-alda-designboom-02.jpg\")
No Footprint House, A-01, Costa Rica, 2019 | image \u00a9 Fernando Alda<\/a><\/p>\n