However, without eluding the potentialities of form, there are essential problems that escape its dominion. Contradictions – whether political, social or economic – should act as triggers capable of pulling all the strings of architecture, however indifferently and comfortably it sometimes seems to develop in the interior of an autonomous world, far removed from the pressing nature of political decisions, wherein tensions and disagreements often end up reduced to strictly rhetorical problems, exercises in style for which the economy represents merely the establishment
of pre-established hygienic and abstract margins within which to operate.

II
But originally, economy – οἰκονομία – was the term used to denote the administration of domestic resources, the management of the household (οἶκος). The economy belonged, therefore, albeit not exclusively, to the accessible scale of the home, to the boundaries of the familiar. Yet despite this, domesticity, as has recently been made manifest, is also related in an immediate and fragile way to the great scale of the macro-economy, over which politics and power exercise their liberal safeguard. Evictions, the abandoning of housing blocks, entire neighbourhoods standing vacant with a myriad of interiors awaiting use, all connect small universes with a global machinery over which society is demanding new control, a reformulation of all that is public, and, with that, of the boundary between the individual and the collective.

III
We are devoting this issue of Quaderns to domesticity. But we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that behind what we understand by domestic lie only notions such as house, home, shelter or privacy. The domestic combines politics with form, connecting differing scales and extending its domain from the macroeconomy to the most irreducible form of architecture in usage terms: the room, to which we have devoted a part of this issue. The house, understood as an aggregation of rooms, predetermines, from the way these relate to each other or from their different sizes, how it will be occupied and what kind of relationships will be established within it over time. This is how the conception of the domestic form approaches politics: to the extent that it can perpetuate certain stereotypes and condition over time the transformation of the domestic sphere.

It is precisely in this ambivalence of scales, where we can see how the definition of domesticity describes the limit that lies between what is individual and what is public, between the urban world and the home, concepts demarcated by a blurred and continually moving boundary.

If the philosopher Jürgen Habermas — as Francesc Magrinyà reminds us in one of the texts that opens this issue —, described the genesis and transformation of the public sphere under the auspices of the emerging bourgeoisie and, with it, the transformation of the public space that sustained it [1], we can confirm, analogously, a gradual confusion between public and private spheres, accompanied by a growing gap between what is individual and what is collective, as described by Sennett in his famous The Fall of Public Man. [2]

Nevertheless, as we see how in the executing of evictions, it is precisely from the street, i.e. from the public space, that a part of society, through its presence, heightens the visibility of the private world [3], we can’t help but think about the perverse ideological logic of slogans that, strengthening these boundaries, aim to make our home a fictitious independent republic.

Perhaps, ultimately, domesticity is no more than an excuse to consider how, based on all these contradictions, architecture needs to reflect in order to come up with renewed ideas that will allow it to advance towards the reconquest of what is public.

—Gillermo López, José Zabala, Anna Puigjaner, Ethel Baraona. Editors

[1] Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere], Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962.
[2] Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man, Knopf, New York, 1977.
[3] We would like to thank Xavier Monteys for this suggestion.

/// Header image: Modern Ruins, a Topography of Lucre, Julia Schulz-Dornburg.
/// Contents of Quaderns #265 House and Contradiction, here.

[This is an extract from a series of interviews conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Kazuo Shinohara.]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In our last interview we discussed the “beauty of chaos” and “progressive anarchy”. This time around I’d like to ask you about the “mathematical city”. Designing a city generally involves all kinds of calculations and planning. But once built, it is very difficult to calibrate the city that exists. In this sense, the concept of the “mathematical city” sounds both paradoxical and extremely interesting.

Kazuo Shinohara: I majored in mathematics before studying architecture. Therefore, for me, thinking about mathematics is almost the same as thinking about architecture. It is like two sides of the same coin. I first started to talk about the “mathematical city” around 1967. At that time I had completed the House in White and my thinking was still deeply related to Japanese tradition. So, I started to say that the composition of a city should be based on the abstract and the neutral, which both include mathematical thinking. In short, I was now talking about something completely the opposite of Japanese tradition. These two directions are not in direct confrontation. But they do have an ambivalent relationship. The concept first provides a reason for small houses to exist; and then an opposing aspect emerges, so that the huge urban space of the city itself surfaces.

Until the 1960s, I had no direct experience in handling a city, and I said simply that the city could be left in chaos. In other words, we could only describe a city as an aesthetic of chaos. After that, I stated that the composition of a huge city could not be controlled without mathematics. It was impossible to achieve a real city composition by formal means, as was fashionable at the time. It was useless. And then, some ten or twenty years later on, chaos theory appeared in the field of mathematics. Therefore, my point of view, i.e. that the composition of a city has a complex mathematical nature, was given theoretical support by mathematical progress after a decade or two. Since chaos theory in mathematics was very new at the time, the rest of the architectural community reacted coldly during the 1970s and 1980s. Then, the theory suddenly became highly influential. My own vision, which I had stated around 1967, was perfectly synchronized with it. It was a mathematical approach positing that very state of confusion, or lack of unity, as its essential significance.

House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch

HUO: In your opinion, what is the ideal model for living?

KS: The central concept of modernism in the 20th century has been to unify. One of the concepts was an “international style”, by which architects tried to unify everything making use of its clarion principles. To take an extreme example, the Bauhaus even tried to coordinate table linens.

Now we’re approaching the 21st century and I am writing a series of articles, which say that the “un-unified” will assume superior value over humdrum unity. Restoring disjunction will become more important during the next century. After World War II, Tokyo had become a heap of ashes, and many progressive Japanese architects thought that they could completely transform it making use of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. They were dreaming. But I didn’t agree with their view. I stated that there is beauty in chaos. That was in the early 1960s, forty years ago. Nobody agreed with me, it was such an un-avant-garde idea for those times. The area surrounding Shibuya station was a typical example, with its sprawling, inconsistent, messy and natural conditions. But in fact, ten years later, a newspaper interview with younger people and foreign tourists asked them what they considered the most exciting area in Tokyo. Many answered, “Shibuya”. However, for progressive architects, Shibuya had always been one of the most ugly spots in Tokyo.

HUO: Could you tell us about your ideas of myth and chaos?

KS: In every myth, wherever it derives, there is a chaotic state. A great deal of energy is wasted. And, at first glance, that seems a negative loss. However upon reaching a certain level, it will be condensed into a powerful force. To achieve this, one must jettison all the force so far expended when this energy is sublated. What is created at that moment is a new first order. Take the example of an older period when ancient empire is the first order. But as this order gradually expands, it begins to break up. Then, a chaotic state starts to seek the next step. Through a repetition of confusion and conflict, the next order will appear. Thus, I can also say that chaos is a force or activity that advances toward the future. But, intentionally, I try not to use such words, because they sound too vague for what I want to convey. Anyway… although I do not know how the mechanism works, concentrated energy is actually converted into order whenever I introduce extraneous matter. The word “stimulation”, or “intervention”, might be better.

Kazuo Shinohara house in Yokohama, 1984. Photograph: Terutaka Hoashi

Interpreter: In scientific fields, and especially in complex systems, they use the word “emergence”, not “generation”, when describing something new. Your term is thus very close to science.

KS: I wanted nothing to do with the city when I was young, and that fact gives me a unique stance. But after working with smaller spaces that I tried to purify or to unify, I was able to take an opposite approach in my thinking. However, whatever I design, the world itself does not become beautiful. Formerly, I succeeded in generating opposition and I frankly stated my attitude as a “manifesto”. Since I examined our chaotic situation from an opposing point of view, by means of small houses, I gained an understanding of the structure of chaos. And I would like to add one more important point. I may design individual buildings but I am unable to design a city. In my opinion these are two completely separate things. People, culture, and climate generate cities. Not individuals. That was the biggest mistake made by Modernism.

HUO: What can you say about the self-organizing city?

KS: Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasilia as a very beautiful city, which is also well organized. At the same time, a slum area grew up, where the construction workers were living outside the designed area of the city. Soon after the city was completed, people began to prefer this older area to the new part because it was more comfortable. This is a typical example of what Modernism tried to eliminate. If a city becomes over orderly, you can always uncover an opposite and contradictory system. Therefore, there is clearly some other more complex structure of the city at work. Brasilia itself has a perfect design, but when a residential zone springs up alongside it, this latter is regarded as agglomerative or confusing. My idea is just the reverse. My small houses have a clear principle, whilst Tokyo is itself confusion. But we should be wary in construing the meaning of “confusion”, which isn’t the same as “disorder”.

HUO: When I talked with Cedric Price, he suggested that we use the word “city” too frequently and with so many different meanings that we are losing the original sense of the word. It becomes ever more blurred. So, it might be better to create a new term instead of “city”. If you have any good ideas, please tell me.

KS: I do not use the word “city” that much these days. In Japanese there is the notion of machi. I prefer this concept; it is closer to the term “neighborhood” or “district” in English.

Kazuo Shinohara, House in White, 1966. Photograph: Hiroshi Ueda.

HUO: What exactly is this notion?

KS: There are so many houses everywhere in Tokyo. And these houses will generate a street. The important point is that a street doesn’t generate houses. Houses make the street. So, to be more precise, machi implies houses producing the street as “house-scape” or as townscape.

HUO: Is that something organic?

KS: Well, for example, Europe’s older towns came into being naturally. And I do not know what the process was; a situation where houses stand beside each other as a matter of course is really something that just happens. This situation generates a street. In this sense, a street is no empty thing, in terms of figure and ground. Thus houses become the figures, so I prefer this view. That is why I use machi or “housescape”.

HUO: So is the line more important than the points?

KS: Rather, the façade line of the houses. I recall whole small villages I saw in southern Spain. In those little villages, the street seemed like a floor and the houses on either side like walls. I felt surrounded by white walls, and I liked that feeling very much.

HUO: You have written about chaos in the city, and at the same time you have influenced a couple of generations of architects when it comes to designing small urban houses. Would you tell me more about this?

KS: It is hugely important to understand the process of designing a tiny work. On the one hand, there are so many tall buildings around us, such as in Shinjuku, but they possess no power. Then there is the tiny house I constructed on a small budget making use of inexpensive materials, and somehow this tiny house exerts influence. A French architect based in Bordeaux who had seen this House in Uehara published was so impressed that she came all the way to Japan to study it. I perform experiments within a tiny space. I put extraneous elements into that tiny space to see what will happen. It is like a scientific experiment, and it is great because you can follow the process visually. It’s like the theory of elementary particles in physics, where a particle reflects the structure of the whole world.

/// Header image: House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara [model]. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch.
Special thanks to Enric Massip-Bosch for his wonderful contribution with the photographs of Kazuo Shinohara, Office and own house in Yokohama, 1984.
/// More info about the work of Kazuo Shinohara can be found in the latest issue of JA+U, Kazuo Shinohara Complete Works in Original Publications.

Roberto Soundy: When we think about a profoundly divided and disputed territory like Diyarbakir, displacement is the first thing that springs to mind. With over 3,000 villages destroyed, the social and political conflict that has pounded the region over the last thirty years has caused a deep gash in national and municipal policy on housing. In your opinion, what is the significance of housing and what are the possibilities for a project for the city in the face of conflict?

Martino Tattara and Caglayan Ayhan-Day: Everyone has a right to adequate housing and shelter. It does not matter whether you are in the middle of a conflict zone or a festival; everyone needs a safe house, a place to call home. However, especially during prolonged political conflicts, one sees whole settlements being evacuated, villages burned, civilians forced to relocate overnight, from rural to urban settlements, leaving their livelihoods behind, and left with only memories.

Diyarbakir, we wanted to bring international and local architects, academics, central government, local government, and local NGOs together around the same table, and get them to collaborate on how to provide adequate housing for the displaced communities who had been living in impoverished and unhealthy conditions – usually in squatter houses – in Diyarbakir. We thought that if we could incorporate the displaced communities into the project as arbitrators, to guide us regarding where to start, to tell us what they want, to review the work we have done, perhaps we could open a space for a therapeutic process of sorts.

After all, talking about buildings, gardens, courtyards and urban plans has the potential to be less confrontational and less biased than talking about imprisonment, ongoing conflict in the mountains, bans on the native language or unfair economic and social policies. Still, talking about housing can be equally productive: it juxtaposes stories about village and city, past and present, suffering and joy. So, we thought housing was a good place to start: it is an urgent need for the displaced communities living in squatter houses, and providing it is an indisputable obligation for the local and central government bodies. It is an academic and technical issue where professional expertise is required, and it is a social issue in which the experience and mediating role of NGOs are vital.

Destruction of a village; scorched-earth military campaign.

Urbanisation of Diyarbakir; gecekondu (barracks settlement) towards inner city wall.

RS: Understanding the role of typology becomes critical, considering the continuous influx of forced rural migrations, especially since the 1990s. How can alternative forms of domestic architecture accommodate for the culturally disparate needs of the population?

MT/CA: Diyarbakir presents many challenges related with housing typologies and domestic architecture and their links to the needs and desires of the current population. Current housing production, whether the result of speculative real-estate forces or of the governmental agency for social housing [TOKI], is dominated by one unique ‘global’ model – a multi-apartment concrete block unit with approximately 10 to 15 floors – that in the case of Diyarbakir has monopolised housing development over the last decade or two. This typology has no relation with the traditional urban structure of the region – characterised by a dense pattern of narrow alleys and two-courtyard houses – nor with the local climate, characterised by extremely hot and long summers. Despite the poor construction and the poor climatic performances of these ‘modern’ units, this model still represents, for the majority of the population, the symbol of modern urban living. Proposing alternative forms of domestic architecture in Diyarbakir is therefore a social and anthropological challenge as well as an urban and architectural one. In our work, we approached the housing and domestic architecture project as inseparable from the possibility of changing the lives and livelihoods of affected people. We tried to understand the socioeconomic practices and living spaces of people in Diyarbakir, and we explored ways of opening up spaces of possibility within existing urban conditions. We also tried to emphasise that the conditions of Diyarbakir today have to be understood on their own terms, and dealt with as such.

RS: Beyond housing intended as a solution for offering higher living standards to a displaced and general population, the possibility of constructing a new idea of the city is at stake. What roles may national and municipal stakeholders, but also developers, NGOs and civil society play in questioning traditional modes of urban renewal?

MT/CA: The issue of urban renewal of the inner parts of Turkish cities is of paramount importance today, since TOKI has recently been assigned the new and urgent task of carrying out urban transformation projects all over Turkey, instead of just adding new, large-scale residential estates on the outskirts of Turkish cities. As many international cases have shown, and as many sociologists have already described, urban renewal often triggers processes of gentrification and displacement of the existing population living in certain parts of the city. In the case of Diyarbakir, the risk of gentrification is indeed present, especially in the ancient walled city – Suriçi, a neighbourhood with approximately 71,000 inhabitants – where land prices are currently greatly devalued and where speculative purchasing of land would begin as soon as there are any indications that the area might be improved.

Aerial picture of Suriçi. A large number of vacant parcels have become the location for the new proposed housing units.

With our project, we attempted to propose an alternative way of addressing the current urban landscape of the city, focusing on the potential of architecture to engage in both the economic and the social logic of the transformation process, striking a balance between investments for new middle-class enterprises and the potential that the current inhabitants could offer. This was particularly difficult as the current community moved into the neighbourhood during the migration waves of the last three decades and is not recognised by the city’s authorities as ‘autochthonous’. Indeed, for many local citizens, current inhabitants should simply be relocated to other parts of the city, leaving their houses and neighbourhoods for more prosperous, local, wealthy inhabitants. In order to counter this approach, we tried to show how it was especially this migrant population, with a rural background and view of life, that has been able to adapt to the older structures of the old city and its decaying courtyard houses. They established patterns of formal and informal economy and of solidarity that were directly linked to the urban and architectural form of this part of the city. Their self-built houses did not look as beautiful as their historical counterparts, and they may have further damaged some of the original structures in the historical houses they occupied. But it is also thanks to them that the old city is still socially very exciting and inviting. Thanks to them, the old city is still able to survive as a unique and lively habitat facilitating a specific mode of social solidarity and organisation.

Avoiding discussion on ‘origins’ and on whether someone has more ‘right’ to be a dweller in a certain part of the city than someone else, it seemed to us that triggering a new process of displacement would be devastating not only for those affected, but primarily for the neighbourhood and the process of renewal that is, especially in this case, associated with its preservation. This principle was and still is difficult to get across, and we feel that it is the task of NGOs and civil society initiatives – the most progressive component of Turkey – to question traditional modes of urban renewal before municipal and national stakeholders.

A courtyard house in Suriçi.

A new courtyard house for a vacant site in Suriçi. [project by Gabriel Cuéllar].

RS: As negotiations between the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party] and the Turkish government advance, the prospects of a negotiated settlement grow for Kurdish families separated by decades of conflict. Diyarbakir may yet again find another influx of inhabitants, only this time in the form of repatriation. In this respect, what purpose may local government policy represent in the social production of housing as a project?

MT/CA: It might be a little early to talk about such repatriation for the Kurds in Turkey. But if there will ever be an example of social housing being produced in Turkey, that will most likely take place in a city run by the Kurdish political party. Probably as a result of long years of political struggle and suffering, Kurds in Turkey have a unique passion, engagement and longing for a beautiful, peaceful and egalitarian urban and cultural environment. In cities run by the Kurdish political party in the Southeast and East of Turkey, the local governments seem to have a greater influence on public opinion and attitudes, and a more active role in creating a lively social and cultural urban environment. This is indeed a great advantage that facilitates the social and collective production of urban landscape.

However, housing projects take up a lot of time and resources for any local government. A local government determined to maximise public benefit rather than financial profit in urban planning policies would be taking great political and economic risks. But once local government’s resistance to undue urban profit is supported with actual examples of withheld building permits, increasing urban green areas right within the city centre and so on, this might slowly pave the way for a change in local people’s demands for different types of housing as well. If there are local incentives such as faster or less municipal paperwork for housing cooperatives that promise to build social facilities as part of their projects, if the municipality further develops a small scale multi-stakeholder partnership to set an example of such a collectively designed social housing project, then public opinion might also change towards developing multi-stakeholder partnerships, maximising social rather than economic urban capital.

In other words, we could also envision a situation in which powerful local governmental and nongovernmental actors have the upper hand in channelling desires related to urban landscape and planning. In such a situation, private interests, regardless of their economic capital, would be unable to sidestep local interests in their pursuit of accumulation and profit, and would have to devise and develop their projects bearing in mind the need to win the approval of a deeply democratic local governmental structure.

/// Martino Tattara and Caglayan Ayhan-Day led the research studio ‘Designing for Surici: Rethinking Urban Renewal.’ at The Berlage.
/// The large-scale strategic plan for Diyarbakir has been developed within the framework of the Berlage Institute research studio ‘After Displacement: Large-Scale Housing Solutions for Diyarbakir‘ led by Martino Tattara and Joachim Declerck.
/// This text is part of the research project Posconflicto Laboratory. The complete research material will be published in a forthcoming book with the same name.

EDITORIAL

P02 House and Contradiction
P04 Interview with Ada Colau

4 ESSAYS x 1 CASE
P09 Possible futures: Cooperatives, from ownership to use. A conversation.
P13 1967-1969, A cooperative housing block. A conversation with Martí Anson and Manel Brullet
P18 Property trust. Sebastián Adamo.
P22 Diyarbakir: Housing the city. Interview with Martino Tattara (DOGMA) and Caglayan Ayhan-Day, by Roberto Soundy.

ARCHIVE 
Cuadernos de arquitectura nº 68/69, “Revista de revistas”, 1967.
P27 Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Kazuo Shinohara.
P31 Critical metabolism. Interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto—Atelier Bow Wow.

2 ESSAY x 4 CASES
P36 Room Non-room. Peter Märkli, Atelierhaus Weissacher by Florian Beigel and Philip Christou.
P42 The house with equal-sized room. Xavier Monteys.
P46 De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. Rot Ellen Berg.
P50 Kuu Architects. Minus K House
P54 Pezo von Ellrichshaussen. Solo House
P58 Ted’A Arquitectes. Casa Lluís i n’Eulalia

OBSERVATORY
P63 Emiliano López-Mónica Rivera. Photographic diaries.
P66 Un parell d’arquitectes. Room, doors and windows.
P68 Vora Arquitectura. Mercè’s apartment.
P70 Rafael Berengena, Marta Poch. Casa AA.

SUPLEMENT

P72 Domestic fragments. Luis Díaz-Mauriño.

Greek architect Aristide Antonas has contributed to our last issue [Quaderns #265 'House and Contradiction'] with a visual of his project Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man. This project and its accompanying series of images are a representation of a system of independent users that substitute a community, inspired somehow by Tyqqun’s Bloom Theory. While developing this project, some of the questions that emerged are: How can we transform this reality to a political condition? How can we think about the Internet as a conscious space for another type of legislations now that both the state and the market withdraw?

What follows are some fragments and thoughts by Aristide Antonas about this project:

Magic exotic island. Interface version. Antonas Office

“I will be making a contrived description concerning the contemporary Internet Man. In this description of him, the Internet Man is organized as the hero of withdrawal. His place of reference is a warehouse. It is through here that my hero strolls, in his own special way. The description of the hero and the situation is not without a certain manufacturing practice of my own: I therefore name the character of the short narrative that follows: the Warehouse Man. The hero of the warehouse is interesting in that he is unable to structure himself. And yet this inability already characterizes him. He is conceived as a character precisely because of this inability; this inability is realized thanks to an organized system of shared, specific characteristics that are adopted by the Warehouse Man and which, at the same time, structure him as a character.

In terms of the Warehouse Man, there are three pairs of concepts that concern me. Through them I will describe the man and the situation: the hero lives in the peculiar, contemporary city. The first pair of concepts that concerns him is Material and Immaterial Homelessness. The second: Somnambulism and Insomnia. And, finally: Control panel and Warehouse [...] Even more so, as will become evident, the Warehouse Hero interprets the contemporary inhabitant of the Internet. The three pairs I introduced are intertwined. At the same moment the concepts are described (as if they make up a glossary or a small dictionary), I attempt to demonstrate their relationships. Material – Immaterial Homelessness, Somnambulism – Insomnia, Control Panel – Warehouse.”

“Before anything else” the Warehouse Man is manufactured by a disturbance of the condition of time and space. At once I ask myself: Can we imagine or can we already see the distortions of time and space which occur from contemporary man residing in the Internet? Does the technically described continuous on-line life have noteworthy consequences on the ethical aspect or the political experience of the society which will ensue? Or is the Warehouse Man nothing new but a mere transformation of an older character?

Nodes techniques. Antonas Office

Regarding the pair of concepts mentioned above, Antonas started with Homelessness, that has taken on a transcendental power in contemporary thought. Focusing on this concept, he pointed that since 1920, in his Theory of the Novel, György Lukács uses the term “transcendental homelessness” to describe man’s urgent, impatient expectation to be “at home” wherever he may find himself. He adds:

“Homelessness was linked to a certain modern concept of “the power to reside anywhere”. Thus, contemporary homelessness is related to the detachment from specific familiar places, as well as to a certain abstract familiarity that is uninterested in the peculiarity of any place. Therefore, the Material – Immaterial Homelessness points to the specific chasm between the literalness and metaphor of homeless residency: between literalness and metaphor, we are asked to talk about homelessness in the modern-day city [...] Buildings, streets, sidewalks, plants, parks and lights were all systematically organized as the material equipment of cities. They were also organized – primarily – as abstract representations. The distribution of space is always at work in modern cities. The apartment actualizes the concept of the urban allotment. Even though it usually remains uninstituted, it describes the law of the urban cell: the right to housing may or may not be constitutionally guaranteed but, in any case, the cell of the apartment embodies the abstract right of participating in a certain apportionment. The inhabitant of the city resides in the apartment. The apartment, as an urban cell which proceeds to multiply (as it finds its place in the urban fabric), builds the city: the city thus emerges as a system for the distribution of housing or as a peculiar archival machine.”

The Warehouse Man. Prison version. Antonas Office.

“Two human characters of the city abstain today from possessing an apartment. For different reasons and in radically different ways, two heroes in the contemporary metropolis make us wonder, immediately after we announce them, whether they belong to what we have, hitherto, termed the “city” [...] Their profile is defined by global characteristics: they are not the protagonists of a local play. The inhabitant of the Internet and the city’s Homeless Person are certainly both homeless. The former is living the metaphorical experience of transcendental homelessness, while the latter has been thrown into the literalness of homelessness on the stage of the city. The metaphor of homelessness is experienced as the condition of an infinite interface.

The hero of the warehouse, on whom I have been focusing from the outset, is an inhabitant of the Internet and an important figure of communal life to whom we refer when we think about the immaterial aspect of homelessness. The place of homelessness (immaterial and tortuously material) will direct every urban compilation of future societies. The difficulty of the homeless person to find a place defines the fact that yesterday’s city will not resemble tomorrow’s. The city no longer seeks simple positions for its homes, but different institutions of homelessness. Moreover: the increase in the number of possible positions for the Warehouse Man does not illustrate only Lukács’s argument for easy nomadic residency, but also the particular inability to reside in a world which is made up as a “population of fragments”. Communities that already form (in an invisible way) the contemporary city are composed of inhabitants of the Internet.

[...]

Accumulation transforms the resident of the Internet into a particular Warehouse Man. At the same time, faced with the voraciousness for stored things, the Warehouse Hero shapes the particular warehouse in which he lives.”

“Anything can be a thing of the Warehouse as long as it is already represented or is declared representable. We claim that in the Warehouse what takes place is not merely the consolidation of objects that were outside it through their classification and representation. The Warehouse contains only representations of objects, without the need to ever present the “objects themselves” [...] The search in the Warehouse is already a compilation of incongruous answers, it does not open the path to an open, unanswered question: it does not show the possible construction of a world organized by the inability to organize.

[...]

The collection of answers which each user receives in the Warehouse will become increasingly difficult to be explored at once as a whole: each answer separately inaugurates other questions and new manifold, fragmentary levels of answers.”

/// The Bloom’s Room, the Island Interface and the City Interface are images prepared at the Antonas office by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni.
/// Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man is an essay by Aristide Antonas, translated by Mary Kitroef. The complete essay will be published soon both in Greek and English. More info: Antonas web-site.

Quaderns: In this issue we focus on the notion of domesticity, both from a political point of view and from the generation of domestic architecture by means of its smallest unit, the room, i.e. two radically opposite but at the same time converging scales. In this sense, and since this section is dedicated to revisiting images or texts published in former issues of this journal, we would like to select a project by Kenji Ekuan. As a matter of fact, Ekuan’s work as an industrial designer has ranged from the small scale of objects to the big scale of the city during its Metabolist period, a period that, after the crisis of WWII, was left facing some uncertainties about the immediate future. In your own practice you have constantly referred to the concept of Metabolism and its architecture. What is your position towards this movement and its implications more than five decades later?

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto: Metabolism was a fast movement that tried to conceptualize the nature of the city and of Japanese forms of construction; therefore it has been very important for the modern architectural history of Japan.

Metabolism emerged in the 1960s, in the midst of major economic growth where people were seeking a promising future. Metabolist architects believed that for this to happen, it had to be by means of a concentration of power and capital. This is clearly shown in the model of Metabolism buildings, which were formalized by means of a core around which capsules could be placed and, therefore, buildings could supposedly be easily adapted to changes affecting society. These kinds of infrastructures could only be tackled with the support of powerful public initiatives. But instead, what really happened after the 1960s, is that the surface of the city was occupied by very tiny, two- or three-story high houses promoted by individual initiatives. The Government didn’t have sufficient budget to reconstruct the whole city using public money, so instead incentives were given to people to allow them to build their own houses, thus promoting individual private investments. Many people were given 20- to 30-year mortgages to build their home. That turned out to be a very powerful driving force for the reconstruction of Japanese society after WWII.

Therefore, the reconstruction of the city was not achieved through a concentration of capital and power, as Metabolist architects would believe, but instead, it was achieved by the dispersed nature of capital and power. Today, the city of Tokyo has more than 10 million inhabitants and the properties are owned by 1.8 million owners, so that can give some idea of how the city is highly subdivided into small individual ownerships.

Q: You have referred to the term Metabolism with some kind of irony when you defined Void Metabolism, could you explain to us how you relate the two?

YT: We keep on continually regenerating buildings in our cities. The average lifespan of a house is thirty years, so there is constant replacement of buildings going on. We could call that Metabolism, but in a very different way to how Metabolism was addressed in the 1960s. Not referring to a core and capsules, but instead to a void and a grain. I started to call this type of Metabolism based on empty spaces, that is happening today, Void Metabolism.

Atelier Bow Wow. Japan Architect 17 Spring 1995: 227. Source: RNDRD

Q: In a way, this notion of Pet architectures that you have defined and that refers to all these tiny buildings developed in leftover plots in Tokyo, takes this idea to the extreme and can be understood as the antithesis of those big systematic Metabolist projects, though in both the idea of the micro-unit remains…

YT: Pet architectures could be seen as a counter-hegemonic project to the megastructures of Metabolist buildings, but there is a big time gap between the two. I studied Pet architectures thirty years later, so in this sense it is not strictly a counter project. Pet architecture is instead a counter project to formalism. I am very interested in building as a state of practice rather than in the application of a form to the overwhelmed conditions of a context or to the real nature of a place. I really like to see how buildings emerge from the ground, from people, from everyday life, from some corners of the city, which seem to be produced almost by accident. This kind of building clearly shows the state of our practice and how it can go far beyond the value of beauty or ugliness.

Q: This manner of understanding our profession can be related to the concept of the practice of space, i.e. to the way we use space in relationship with everyday life. In this sense, how is your work related to this idea of everyday life, and how is this concept specifically worked out in your houses?

YT: I am always trying to work closely with clients. Our action through design consists of providing them with a recognizable framework, capable of drawing together their entire life experience up to that point. We try to get as close as possible to our clients in order to understand why they want to build a house here and now, what makes them desire a house. Our architectural designs always try to find the best framework to clarify these reasons and also to encourage them to continue practicing themselves, in order to complete their house and make their own life through spaces. So this is my own idea of the practice of space.

Q: Most of your houses don’t have perfectly closed rooms but instead they appear as interconnected spaces. It seems that there’s always this need to build up a dialogue between domestic corners.

YT: My clients usually are not rich so this way of working comes from budget limitations and from the available surface of the site. In order to establish as relational a space as possible, we try to work with the different behaviors of the house: the direction of human bodies, furniture and windows always imply certain behaviors. We utilized these kind of criteria while working out the exterior enclosure, which allows continuous relationships to be created between different behaviors inside the house, so, ultimately there’s no need for strong partitions, different activities can happen in the same continuous interior space.

Q: Going back to a bigger scale, in Japan there are regulations that define urban spaces in residential areas that are difficult to find in our context. For instance your house-atelier is built in the middle of an interior courtyard and it has only one connection to the street through a two-meter-wide passage. Those leftovers are, somehow, domestic spaces as well.

YT: Yes, those spaces are in between domestic and public space. Unfortunately in most cases they are enclosed. In the old days they used green hedges to do it, so they were softer, but nowadays they use concrete or steel fences. They have become more and more ungenerous. I always try to avoid having fences in property lines. Our houses are always built in the city without any enclosure. The treatment of these leftover spaces has so much potential! They can be totally privatized but, in a limited site, if you enclose it you cannot use it, so it just becomes a dead space. It is better to open it, there is a certain sensitivity behind not stepping into this kind of private space. This tension is quite interesting in residential areas.

Q: How do you address public space from the domestic space?

YT: We always plant trees to make it pleasant to walk in front of it… But on a larger scale, Japanese urban space is really different from its European counterpart. We don’t have squares with a church and a town hall enclosing an open space where everybody can gather. European public space is very well constructed and represented. In the case of Japan, the public space is more related to the time and all that accompanies the season, the best example is the time when cherry trees blossom at the end of March or beginning of April. When cherries blossom, people go out to enjoy the new spring season.

People like to go there to admire the cherries, of course, but they also enjoy the synchrony of this gathering of many different people, in the same place and at the same time. In Japan, public space is more related to this synchrony, to the existence of an event happening in the city, or provided by nature or related to religious rituals. People enjoy the public space more according to this sensitivity regarding time. And this is very different from what happens in European culture. Our public space is less programmed and less settled. We just bring blankets and drink sake, sing and talk with neighbors. It is a very joyful moment for any Japanese person. You lose the boundaries of your self and melt into the crowd.

/// Header image: Designboom

We can affirm that collective housing was the driving force that pushed through several of the changes experienced by our habitat during the 20th century. From the city’s advancing occupation of the territory to the introduction of an expanded idea of what we understand today as “domesticity”, collective housing was used as a platform to define the criteria with which the construction of our environment would be tackled.

We can also affirm that, little by little, the market gradually took control of collective housing as a tool for economic development, leading to the appearance of agents who took over the steering of construction project management and whose only purpose has been to increase its speculative potential. Thus, the determination of functional programmes and building sizes and configurations alike, or the relationship between these and the environment into which they are inserted, no longer form part of an agenda that caters for a broad spectrum of problem issues related to the project but rather, are generally limited to free market speculation on a building until it is reduced to a simple commercial product. However, it is not the intention of the writer of this article to propose here any radical opposition to the paradigm of capitalist development, but rather to try to shed light on how we, as architects, could once more involve ourselves in those issues that determine how contemporary collective housing is configured, and argue its potential for transforming our cities.

11 de Septiembre, 3260. CABA, Argentina. Adamo Faiden arquitectos. 2011.
Photograph: Cristóbal Palma

Delving into openings in the market.
Argentina’s emergence from its economic crisis in the year 2001 resulted in a strong boom for the construction industry, sustained by growing demand for investments in the private sector and an enormous housing deficit affecting all strata of our society. In a short time, the urban landscape gradually filled with developments fronted by posters offering not only a means of accessing home ownership, but also a way of participating in a more efficient, safer investment system than that offered by the local financial system of the time.

This situation gave rise to the appearance of two well-differentiated production spheres. Firstly, that of property investments, which continued with the development models explained previously and whose results are not too unlike those lavish expressions of concentration of capital. And secondly, a series of self-managed ventures that emerged from little-researched fields and that found, in the technical and legal format of the fideicomiso (legal trust), a way of making recognizable those conditions that determine their potential. We will describe the characteristics of this latter format in some detail, trying to acknowledge the possibilities it offers as support for trialling new models for approaching and developing small- and medium-scale collective housing buildings.

Basically, a fideicomiso is a notarial instrument whose characteristics allow a group of individuals to come together and pursue a common aim under a system of rules, and subject to the legislation in force. Used as a tool to constitute groups of investors who finance a building’s construction, it presents notable contractual advantages that simultaneously benefit the private and collective interests of the investor group. These instrumental benefits, combined with a long tradition of architects who manage their commissions through active participation in the property market, have converted the fideicomiso into a private organisational tool that currently presents itself as one of the most acceptable sources of work for the architectural discipline’s development in Buenos Aires today.

From disciplinary venture to social practice.
Diverse forms of organisation exist to execute a construction project using this work system. If we analyse it from the angle of the architect’s involvement in the different roles that determine a project’s result, we could observe that, when the architect takes on more responsibilities in the management of a construction, he or she may also obtain a greater degree of freedom in making decisions that affect the project’s quality. This is a formula that does not seem to be very closely in line with the direction taken by the practice of our discipline in recent times. Yet under this specific condition, it offers the opportunity to expand the scope of what until now we have understood by “project” and thus aspire to introduce possible changes that it would be difficult to achieve in any other way than under the parameters of trust afforded by the process. It also offers a chance to build up a positioning within the discipline and introduce a new approach to the construction project that allows us to try out new processes, organisations or techniques that are rarely used in our field.

In the local sphere, this practice was quickly assimilated by a series of architects. Through their daily work and without support from any kind of organisation that tied them, they managed, despite dissimilarities among the results, to convert the fideicomiso into a habitual practice that, supported by sufficient achievements, has established itself in society with a strong tone of “collective desire”. This practice, significantly, has shown fast repercussions and subsequent involvement for those who can aspire to accessing house ownership, people who from their first conversation with an architect show a high degree of interest in participating and being actively involved in a project conceived through this Property Trust system. This situation, a decade on, has allowed a narrowing of the gap between society and architectural enterprises, thus encouraging the appearance of new forms of relationship between professional architect and community.

Conesa 4560. CABA, Argentina. Adamo Faiden arquitectos. 2008.
Photograph: Sergio Pirrone

Towards an open, permeable, simple architecture.
This expanding of responsibilities brings with it an increasing complexity of the project process, inviting architects to adopt a versatile agenda. This will allow them to construct a dialogue with all stakeholders, assuming contingencies with a large dose of optimism and developing open strategies that stimulate the forging of new links between the construction project, the individuals involved and the environment. The project thus becomes an instrument for mediation between each individual’s private desires, the agreed collective needs, and the public responsibility that must be assumed.

If we accept that buildings can be conceived as a tool for mediation, we allow ourselves to tackle their architecture from a position that could demand less protagonism for material qualities and grant greater space to performance qualities, by focusing on the immaterial properties of our habitat to qualify its conditions, building permeable connections with its environment and conceiving spaces presented as purposely unfinished, to stimulate the imagination of those wanting to occupy them. This is a side step that allows the road to be freed up for those aspects that bring architecture back to its humanistic roots, narrowing the gap between it and its end users without intermediaries. An attempt to recover those qualities that allow us to project, through collective housing, a path geared towards intensifying inhabitation.

/// Text from Quaderns #265 “House and Contradiction.” Sebastián Adamo is an architect who together with Marcelo Faiden founded a studio in the city of Buenos Aires in 2005. Adamo has an interest in combining academic work with architectural practice. This approach has led him to research alternative models for building collective housing in Argentina, a country that after the economic crisis of 2001 started to explore new formulas such as the fideicomiso, a legal trust that allows architects to develop housing block projects with multiple investors, often the building’s future owner-occupiers. This model allows them to cut out the middleman which means that a more direct relationship can be established between the architect and the residents.
/// Header image: 11 de Septiembre, 3260. CABA, Argentina. Adamo Faiden arquitectos. 2011. Photo by Cristóbal Palma