Architects, especially young ones, are presently working with miniature structures in order to find out how small, how modest a space can be while still being able to claim that it is architecture. According to the maxim "big ideas, small buildings", they are creating living boxes, view platforms, little outdoor waiting rooms, pavilions, think tanks, kiosks, mobile, portable or pneumatic units, add-on rooms, parasitic structures and so on. The objects of Lucy Orta also form spaces, miniature spaces that can be combined with each other so that they grow into village-like assemblies. But these spaces are strikingly different to the micro-architecture just referred to. They do not primarily relate to the measuring scale or the primeval hut made of branches and leaves. Orta's spaces relate to the human body. As a trained fashion designer who initially worked in the areas of casual wear, trend research and mass production, Lucy Orta now makes bodysuits that can be transformed into tent-like rooms or sleeping bags and then coupled to each other in order to create an ad-hoc community, i.e. fast small housing for mobile elements of society such as refugees, asylum seekers or the homeless. "Fashion is essentially a system of many layers of protection in which we wrap or cocoon ourselves", says Orta and, in her work, leaves open the borders between fashion, architecture and social action. Her minimal rooms are often in direct contact with the body, in fact next to the skin. Then, there are rooms that join people together, that combine the body heat of several people to produce a kind of collective corpus of warmth. Her concern is with how near such a body-space can be to a person and how closely disparate people can actually come together. In other words, she is concerned with spaces for social warmth. These are standards of scale that do not exist in architecture. But they do make us think about what architecture is, how people live today, both in society and in their homes, and what they feel inside their spaces and what they feel without them. Read the full artilce over at a-matter