A Manifesto for Post-COVID Living by Cutwork
In the second of a five-part series, we introduce “Fiction of Together” – the second theme in a manifesto by the Paris based architecture and design studio, Cutwork. The manifesto presents a wide-reaching collection of perspectives about post-confinement architecture, design and living. In its own words, “Following the Covid-19 pandemic, we explore and acknowledge how physical distancing may transform how we live in the future and change our lifestyles for far longer than we might at first imagine.”
“Divided into five core subjects and accompanied by studio co-founder, Antonin Yuji Maeno’s illustrations, Together Has Changed examines the more typical topics of office and home working but also how this may even affect our intimate relationships such as attitudes towards monogamy and how we might prepare for life in a future pandemic.”
“Our collective trajectory is different…not only is global confinement accelerating pre-existing trends (digital transformation, remote working, localized supply chains, self-sufficient production, urban exodus, mass-surveillance), but it is magnifying fundamental systemic flaws.”
“We live in a narrative that prioritizes productivity over self. The global over local. Private property over shared spaces. Economics over ecology. Personal interest over collective perspectives. Now that the world has come to a pause, not only can we see the inherent limits of our former ways to live and work, but also new unexpected opportunities for systemic change.”
“As an architecture and design studio, we are sensitive to societal changes and the drivers behind them. Post-confinement, how will our relationship to cities be affected? What new collective narratives are emerging? How will this impact our relationship to work? How can we design new habitats to accompany and bring out the best of our new ways of life?”
Below, the second of the five core themes explored – “where we recognize that collaborating upon differences is our most powerful capability. Where our habitats encourage this core ability, rather than inhibit it.”

FICTION OF TOGETHER / Reinventing Our Collective Narrative
In the UK, 68% of habitants describe their neighbors as “strangers.” Modern apartment blocks of the 20th century created cities of closed doors, gated perspectives, and cultural separation.
Our cities are built on fictions of exclusivity and division of our differences. Yet, collaboration is at the heart of what makes us human. Large-scale flexible cooperation is exclusive to our species and is what allowed us to expand from small tribes into moon-landing civilizations.
Why should we only fall back on our astonishing ability to collaborate in times of crisis? How can we reimagine today’s habitats to be inclusive to our differences, encourage interactions, and comfortably make space for our vulnerabilities?
The dynamic collisions of our differences is essential to human’s collaborative capabilities. We believe this should be at the core of the definition of our ‘fiction for together’ and how we design our environments.
Do you know any of your neighbors? Over three? Would you consider them to be your friends or trust them enough to let them borrow your bike? If you live in a city and answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, consider yourself lucky. In the UK, 68% of habitants describe their neighbors as “strangers.” More and more people, particularly millennials and urban residents, are bound to answer ‘no’ and don’t interact with neighbors any more than the occasional passing “hello.” While some of us have started interacting with our neighbors more during confinement, for many, social distancing is accelerating this trend to make us even more dependent upon screen-mediated relationships. Together has shifted from local communities to digital networks. But is this for the best? What kind of a fiction do we want to build today to define our collective togetherness?
Many factors have been driving this growing sense of disconnection, but our cities are only making things worse: Cities have been designed for division. Modern apartment blocks of the 20th century created cities of closed doors, gated perspectives, and cultural separation. This form of habitation is built upon a false narrative, asserting a togetherness based upon separating and compartmentalizing our differences. We live in a collage of enclosed differences. We have a tendency to make snap-judgements, place labels, and group people based on superficial likes and differences. Thus, the way we have designed our homes and cities, does not reflect deeper truths of our cooperative condition.
Fictions are at the core of what makes us human. Narratives define our perspectives, identities, experiences, and the ways we engage with others and the world. French psychoanalyst Sarah Chiche puts it this way: “Identity may be the biggest fiction we build for ourselves.” It might be unsettling to accept that every facet of our life and experience relies upon ‘fictions’ we’ve fabricated out of thin air. However, this pure quality of human invention is one of our greatest strengths: Fictions, especially our personal ones, are surprisingly malleable. Being able to share and collectively engage the same stories is what enabled humans to expand from small tribes into moon-landing civilizations. Fictions unlocked an unlimited ability for us to cooperate.
For historian Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapien’s secret of success’ lies in our ability to unite behind fictions – even with complete strangers. “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.” Collective stories gave us a very special edge: the ability to cooperate both flexibly and in large numbers. Cooperation is a survival strategy developed by many species, such as bees and -. chimpanzees. Bees cooperate in mass colonies but with rigid determinate social structures. They cannot, for instance, one day decide to overthrow the queen and found a democratic hive. Chimpanzees can cooperate flexibly, however, only in small numbers. Their cooperation demands a considerable amount of time to carefully build and validate trust across all members within a troop, limiting the size a troop can grow to become. In this respect, large-scale flexible cooperation is exclusive to Homo sapiens, and is at the core of what makes us ‘us’.
The ongoing confinement has given new importance to this fact. It’s by flexible and large-scale collaboration that we respond to a crisis: In France, facing the shortage of masks, a rising makers community produced over 250,000 visors with 3D printing and laser-cutting to help alleviate national demand. In march, when the UK government put out the call for 250,000 volunteers to help the National Health Service, over 750,000 people signed up.
But why should we only fall back on this astonishing ability to collaborate in times of crisis? What possibilities could be unlocked if our habitats encouraged as massive cooperative efforts in ordinary times?

One answer rests in our ‘systems of sharing’. Over the last few years, we have seen an explosive rise of the shared economy. According to Forbes, in 2014, the shared economy was worth 15 billion USD. By 2025, it will be worth over 335 billion dollars. This signals a clear shift in mentality: Ownership is being replaced by access. As of 2017, only 4% of people are unwilling to share anything at all. There is immense potential to redefine our fiction of together through the process of sharing; we just need to continue defining how. How can we rethink systems of sharing in our cities, neighborhoods, and homes to actively encourage personal interactions and collaboration, rather than passively inhibit them – to stop seeing even our neighbors as strangers?
Today, we are witnessing a lot of experiments emerging in cohabitation: new ways to share and collaboratively live in spaces. At its best, cohabitation establishes open, inclusive urban environments to encourage personal interactions, while keeping in mind that it is only possible to be together if there is always the possibility to be alone. In most cohabitation models that have broken ground in the last 10 years, the underlying idea is to create more porous urban blocks, ideally with two key features: an active ground-floor (often a bar or café spot) and an open rooftop community garden. Both these spaces are meant to be accessible to residents and anyone from the street alike. They can become magnets within the neighborhood, where local lifestyles and cultures can intersect and interact with international perspectives – despite any inherent differences.
In this respect, cohabitation can lend space to new forms of inclusivity. However, open, non-assumptive, and vulnerable mindsets are key. Vulnerability, in particular, has proven one of the most potent means to establish the safety and trust needed to build strong relationships, unify group cooperation, and catalyze culture. It doesn’t come after trust; it precedes it. But as we all know, experiencing vulnerability is inherently uncomfortable; we are strongly preprogrammed to avoid it. However, when we recognize its instrumental role in human cooperation and building strong communities, we can work to shift our relationship with it – to embrace it as a kind of ‘good friction’ to be practiced every day. As an architecture and design studio, we are actively questioning: What role can external environments play to encourage us to open up and express our vulnerabilities and differences? How can we turn frictions into a shared resource? And more fundamentally, how can we integrate ‘good frictions’ into a new ‘fiction of together’?
Togetherness should not mean frictionless. There is no perfect way to be together, but for us, inclusivity and vulnerability should be at the core of our ‘fiction of together’. And ‘good frictions’ should be at the core of our habitat designs. As we can see with vulnerability, some kinds of friction are not only good, but essential. Thus, a fundamental goal of cohabitation spaces should be to activate and foster such mindsets – to make us open and receptive to collision, alterity, new traditions, different perspectives, and reinvented rituals.
This is a whole new boundary to be explored, and it is challenging some of the long-held understandings of design. Historically, the underlying goal of design has always been to eliminate friction: to make everything perfectly seamless, without collision or incident. This race for shortcuts and simplification is deeply reflected in how our cities were built upon division and personal compartmentalization. Corridors are a common expression of this: no natural light, residual dead spaces with the sole purpose to get you in or out of your private room. Depending on a building’s corridor system, between 10 and 15% of residential buildings are made up of corridors. Suffice to say, these are not spaces that would be missed! What if we transformed all these outdated, one dimensional spaces into new dynamic experiences – environments that encourage interaction or introduce other forms of ‘good friction’?
If the goal of the 20th was to individually own as much m2 as possible, the goal today might become to live in a habitat that has been designed to encourage and facilitate social interactions – towards the encounter of great differences. Weaving this social fabric out of differences is crucial to unlocking our collaborative potentials. If our cities were built on the exploration of differences, rather than splintering our identities and points of view, they could replace our basic narrative of ‘productive togetherness’ that has been the norm so far.
Cutwork is an award-winning architecture and design studio based in Paris, specializing in co-working and co-living spaces. It designs innovative spaces and furniture for pioneering companies who are re-imagining the way space is shared. A team of architects, designers, engineers, and researchers, Cutwork designs smart, multi-use architectural and interior concepts that make it easy to continually transform a space, build better communities, and encourage collaboration. In 2020 Cutwork won the FRAME Award for Societal Innovation for their work on Flatmates, becoming the youngest studio to ever win a FRAME Award, and in 2018, Cutwork was named in the EIT Climate-KIC list of Europe’s Top 30 Cleantech Startups.
Recent projects include Station F, the largest startup campus in the world home to 1000 startups and the European hubs of Facebook, Microsoft, Ubisoft; Flatmates, the first large-scale co-living space in Paris for 600 entrepreneurs; and the Cortex Shelter by Cutwork, a pioneering self-built, low-cost, long-term,‘just add water’ housing solution to help address the critical humanitarian crisis in refugee housing that received global acclaim.