Maison Partino

Maison Partino asks what a house becomes when it is no longer designed as a whole but negotiated between its parts. Rasa Navasaityte developed the project for the Experimental Architecture Biennale in Prague in 2019 as a set of prototypes for an experimental housing project: a small vocabulary of prefabricated components is given to a reinforcement-learning agent, whose reward is not a floor plan but the quality of the space between the parts, the voids that let light, air and neighbours in. The variants shown here are that negotiation run many times, at the scale of a fragment, a house, a tower and a settlement.

The manifesto that accompanied the prototypes starts from the way the moderns partitioned the city into volumes: cells that capture value, estates that can be traded with ease. Digital economies intensify that trade by shrinking what cannot be traded, the public, and by shrinking what is traded, until the estate becomes a micro-vessel or a capsule. When building parts begin to talk through sensors, interfaces and protocols, they want to partake in the world as well: houses want to be inhabited, walls to compart, stairs to be walked, windows to frame. Part-to-part habitats shape value through an ecology of participating capacities, and the house that results is no longer a domus, that which contains, but a maison partino, that which partakes. In the manifesto’s image, the huts of the moderns turn into trees, leaves and twigs, and their inhabitants into birds.

The variants were rendered on 7 June 2019, a week before the opening, as pale aggregates of slabs and frames: low rows casting long shadows, a field that reads as a settlement, a dense tower, a section cut through the rooms between the parts. At Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera, from 14 June to 30 August 2019, they were shown as a long white and grey model of stacked slabs on a black plinth, with framed prints of the aggregates, a text panel and a film on the wall behind it.

The project was published as The Maison Partino Manifesto in Antigonismos 04: Computation (Buenos Aires, November 2019) and reprinted in the Revista Digital Antigonismos in 2020. Its method carries forward the Large City Architecture research: parts as the unit of composition, and the relations between them rather than the objects themselves as the material of design. Asked of ecological relations rather than economic ones, the same question became the subject of Navasaityte’s dissertation, Between the Parts: A Relational Methodology for Ecological Design (University of Innsbruck, 2026).