1km2
At DROO, the 1km² scale forms a critical design horizon: a dimension large enough to embody urban complexity yet small enough to retain the materiality, tactility and authorship of architecture. This is the scale at which daily life unfolds through continuous physical experience—where streets, buildings, landscapes and infrastructures intersect in ways that shape identity, mobility and belonging. It corresponds to what we call the in‑between scale, an interval where neither architectural object nor full urban plan is sufficient on its own. Instead, both must operate together to shape a coherent and adaptive environment.
[DROO.COM_W…ign_251015 | Word], [Michel da…es in chat | Teams]
Working at this scale requires more than masterplanning: it demands an architectural understanding of thresholds, typologies, and the textures of lived space. Our projects consistently merge building logics with urban behaviour—using architectural structures to generate spatial rules, and using urban analysis to calibrate architectural form. This dual lens allows us to design clusters, blocks and campus‑like arrangements that feel both intentional and open-ended. We build on the idea, articulated in our internal research, that an urban project can be understood through the same attentiveness brought to detail, and that detail can reveal the dynamics of the city. This combined-scale methodology ensures that every intervention—down to materials, façades, circulation paths and microclimatic envelopes—contributes to a broader urban coherence.
The 1km² scale also matches what our team often describes as the limit of physical relevance: the extent of territory most people intuitively understand without depending on high-speed transport or mediated navigation. Beyond this distance, spatial experience becomes discontinuous; within it, patterns of everyday movement—walking, cycling, social encounters—form a legible whole. Designing within this boundary offers a powerful opportunity to shape neighbourhoods that support local economies, public life and ecological resilience. This is not simply the “15-minute city,” but a more precise spatial unit anchored in how people inhabit and remember place.
Our approach extends to contexts where the 1km² scale becomes “perfectly awkward”—too large for a single building yet too small for conventional city-planning frameworks. In such spaces we deploy architectural thinking as an urban driver: composing clusters, organising public edges, negotiating building heights and densities, and integrating landscape as connective tissue. This is evident in several conceptual and built projects in which the site becomes an ecosystem rather than a plot—a place where networks of movement, programme adjacency, and civic life are orchestrated with architectural granularity.
A core component of our method is the use of register-based design, where we map structural, environmental, cultural and mobility systems across the 1km² field. These registers help us identify friction points and latent opportunities: unused backlands, landscape corridors, underperforming public fronts, or block geometries capable of supporting new typologies. Registers also guide future adaptability, ensuring the framework can accommodate phased growth, shifting uses and emerging technologies without losing coherence.
By approaching the 1km² scale as a designable, experiential and evolutive unit, DROO produces urban architectures that feel both intimate and expansive—places shaped with the precision of buildings and the vision of cities.
