Sloft #3

Sloft is a magazine about architecture, design and decoration with a specific focus on compact interiors. We promote a vision of a more sustainable city, more accessible and nicer. We believe that architecture is an answer to rethink urban life and address the challenges it faces: pollution, stress, and increasing cost of living, noise, etc.

In this third bilingual issue :
We take you to Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, Picardy, Ghent, Venice and even Osaka... without forgetting Paris, to discover works that speak to us of the present and of eternal time. Present time with the rediscovery of the architectural heritage of the 1970s, showing a new interest in its functional flats located in large condominiums.

Or with the new look at suburban cities that were once off the radar. Eternal time with the possible dream of a Venetian palace. Or through the distancing of contemporary agitation within the thick walls of a house in Osaka. Or in the calm of a Picardy workshop.

We are also interested in townhouses for their ability to fit into a constrained urban fabric by exploiting unusual plots. We discover the first work of an architect-artist who became a giant, Tadao Ando's Sumiyoshi Row House in Osaka, which is all about horizontality. And in Ghent we take up his vertical counterpoint by discovering the improbable house of Natalie and Hannes, as playful as it is innovative.

With their fierce independence and resistance to the homogeneous master plan, these houses assert the very personal identity of their designers in the urban fabric, and bring to the city the faces of a welcome urban diversity.

Finally, we invite ourselves to the homes of three designers. In the hidden workshop of the designer duo who founded the Herah studio, Louis Ainesi and Quentin Ravasse, to discuss with them their desire for independent manufacturing. And in Aubervilliers, at the home of the visual artist and model agency owner Cyril Debon, who shares with us an artistic project that is as disruptive as it is jubilant!

Eclecticism, poetry, art, escape, beauty and good ideas are definitely not a function of the number of square metres!