Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

Studio Mumbai, “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity” [1]

Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai was in Porto’s Forum of the Future, last November, as part of the 2015 edition on the topic of Happiness. The Mumbai-based office has gained increasing visibility within the architectural scene of the past few years. This is largely due to a commitment to the use of artisanal materials and construction techniques, and to a discourse that advocates a sense of emotion and proximity with nature and place in an attempt to escape the “normativity imposed by globalization” (as can be read in the presentation brochure). Tradition, modernity, nature, landscape, are keywords of Jain’s lexicon, who graduated from the University of St. Louis, USA, in 1990, and whose career passed through Los Angeles and London before settling in India, where most of his built work is located.

Bijoy Jain’s presentation was consistent with his ethos. Following the modus operandi of many current architectural presentations, Jain entwined images of his personal cabinet of curiosities with photographs of his oeuvre. He devoted special attention to the description of construction details and traditional techniques, often emphasizing the work of artisans on site and evoking an overall harmonious relation between materials, techniques, architect, artisans and nature.

In a world where architecture is being increasingly afflicted by pure techno-logistical automatism and empty prêt-à-porter formalistic experimentations, Studio Mumbai seems to offer that last glimmer of hope and dignity that appears to have abandoned the discipline once and for all. It is thus not by chance that in a recent exhibition catalogue by the Canadian Center for Architecture – entitled Rooms You May Have Missed: Umberto Riva, Bijoy Jain, edited by Mirko Zardini – one can read that Studio Mumbai “proposes an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture and role for the architect in the economy of building”. However, it is precisely within this elated note of glorification that disturbing signs emerge to tarnish such an optimistic portrayal.

Athanasius Kircher, ‘Topographia Paradisi Terrestris’ (1675).

1. Artificial islands – nature, interiority, immunization

The first sign is the recurring appearance of the same type of program, the single-family house (notably generous regarding both dimensions and economy), but also the same kind of landscape, an exotic and wild piece of nature. Even in the case of their own office-house, located in a densely urbanized area of Mumbai, the city itself is presented in an aerial view taken at night, veiled in the quasi-poetic atmosphere of a soft mist (or is it smog?) that tempers the density, chaos and, most importantly, the disturbing inequalities that flourish in a megalopolis like Mumbai. These houses present a version of India that is absolutely idealized, stripped and disinvested of all the social and economic contradictions and discrepancies that dramatically affect and produce its everyday life and territory. [2]

It is not by chance that these houses tend to fold inwards. They act as shelters that either open up to chase fragments of a mystified virgin nature, or enclose themselves inter muros seeking to recreate an original Eden, a miniaturized and idealized Earth like a hortus conclusus [3]. Therefore, contrary to what is being claimed, this is not an “architecture of proximity”, but rather an architecture of distance: it separates and detaches. Paradoxically – and this is Bijoy Jain’s magical touchstone – the effective apparatus of this detachment from the exterior is nature itself, or rather, nature converted into landscape.

The erasure of the exterior is not operated by walls and fences but by the large openings – windows and doors framing those miniature paradises or staging those nature-cloaks. But exteriority is not merely a question of opposition between outside and inside, nor is it simply a matter of genius loci; it is the social, political, and economical circumstance in which every house is de facto inscribed. Exteriority is a condition of togetherness, a relationship with otherness that belongs irreducibly to the human, shaping his sense of community, his own social self. It is not space that is a condition for the possibility of being together, but it is the being together that makes space possible.

The more idyllic this nature-as-landscape is, the more efficient the exorcising of exteriority becomes. But this architecture has no nostalgia for a return to pre-capitalist ideas of community (as in William Morris) or to a status of spontaneous and holistic relation with nature (as with Rudolph Schindler, to name a reference close to the Indian architect). These houses are neither “shelters from the bustle of the city”, in the euphemistic formula of Bijoy Jain, nor the hortus conclusus of a subject who retreats from the world in an act of resistance or exhaustion. They are artificial islands (a sort of singular family condos or gated communities) where fences and walls have been replaced by the eloquent nature-landscape apparatus, subtly detaching the houses from an exterior, which in the particular context of India assumes an especially problematic and disturbing condition.

These artificial islands are not enclaves of resistance against a specific logic of contemporary spatial production, they are softened cosmopolitan capsules, biospheric universes of highly connected networked individuals, artificial continents where an elite with high economic power finds a form of isolation and immunization from the processes of spatial production of which they are primarily responsible. They are systems of immunization that create an artificial, self-sufficient environment while minimizing all outside communication and simulating their own private public sphere. In line with Peter Sloterdijk, we can claim that these houses constitute themselves not only as “integral mechanisms of defense”, but also as “ignorance machines” where “the fundamental right of not-respecting the exterior world finds its architectural formula.”

Unsurprisingly, the reverse of these artificial continents – so cynically frugal – is the slum. The city of Mumbai – built over the years on landfills conquered from the sea – is itself an archipelago of artificial islands surrounded by the great ocean of slums. As always, the flip side of the “ecology of fantasy” is the “ecology of fear and violence”. And in any case, as Lieven de Cauter points out, “where fear and fantasy build artificial biospheres, the everyday is abolished”, immersed as it is in the lonely design of its own self-immunization and self-consumption.

Studio Mumbai, house Tara

2. Artisans, nostalgia, indigence

But there is a second sign, another crack in this Arcadian mise-en-scène: the employment of traditional processes and construction techniques comes with a condescending view of the artisan. The example presented by Jain in his conference in Porto of a woman at the building site transporting – “with such elegance” – a pile of bricks on her head, is a clear indication of this. In praising the gesture’s aesthetic and performative dimension one does not respect the artisan’s know-how – her techniques, modus operandi, authorship or social relevance – but simply romanticizes and fetishizes the condition of being-artisan. If, on the one hand, this approach may be helpful in calling for a lost harmonious relationship with labor – useful to challenge the automation and abstraction of large building sites – on the other hand, it does not do more than soften and naturalize the artisan’s framework of exploitation. Naturally, an entirely different situation would arise if the artisan were mobilized in a process where her emancipation (political and social) or that of her community’s would be at stake, for example, in the construction of a collective building where she would be contributing with work and knowledge and where the architect would act as a technical mediator of this process.

The act of romanticizing the artisan thus accomplishes the same function as the nature-landscape apparatus: if the latter softens the contrasts and inequalities of capitalist spatial production, the former, by sustaining the myth of original happiness in labor, naturalizes the artisan’s indigent social and economic condition, for, once finished the job, she has no choice but to return to the field of slums without qualities and to the eternal destiny reserved to her by the castes and capitalist economy.

Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

3. Studio Mumbai: “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”?

The fundamental matter here at stake is not to assess the aesthetic or technical quality of studio Mumbai’s work, but rather to attempt to deconstruct the current critical narrative that legitimizes this practice as “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”. Both the praising of traditional techniques and the idyllization of nature have been, for quite some time now, the impetus behind multiple architectural practices who appoint themselves a role of resistance against processes of globalization (for example, Peter Zumthor). This sensitive phenomenological discourse, endorsing a relationship with the world under the umbrella of sustainability and ecology, is particularly powerful because it addresses an essential gap in the relationship between humans and nature that has permeated modernity and globalized capitalist production of space.

But the real ambition of this kind of discourse is far from any real resistance, on the contrary, it fully integrates within the dominant logic of production. It frames our nostalgia for a lost paradise, an original Eden, and it dissimulates the problematic recurrence of a territory impregnated with social inequalities and violent processes of extraction-production-consumption. All the while, its success within the architectural field stems from the fact that it works as a fetish, a “stand in”, replacing that which one cannot have. It gives us the illusion of effectively attending to architecture’s real anxieties, and so it captivates many people: the increasing technocracy of architectural design, its empty formal experimentation, the absence of any content independent of the monetary-economical circuit, its conversion into a lifestyle commodity, its reduction to mere instrument of territorial logistics (from the exhausting icons of the Western world to the urbanizations sans rêve et sans merci in China and Dubai). In short, this kind of nostalgic discourse is the way through which architecture attempts to exorcize the ghosts of its immediate future without giving them, however, any effective solutions.

Architectural practices such as Studio Mumbai certainly produce beautiful images that easily populate our imaginary; they may even provide us with precious indications of how to apply local construction techniques, or they might suggest seductive conceptions of domestic space. But their relevance does not go further. They do not offer any hints, nor any tentative alternatives, nor do they even begin to state apprehensions regarding the role and task of architecture in the present condition. Contrary to what is stated, Studio Mumbai’s architecture does not offer an “alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”, it does not even critically address it. It only fetishizes nature and the vernacular, fully absorbing them into the endless circuit of neoliberal economy, efficiently converting the anxieties and fractures that it itself triggers into new business opportunities. What Studio Mumbai so blatantly displays in those “beautiful” houses is none other than paradise as commodity.

Studio Mumbai, house Utsav. Photography: Studio Mumbai Architects.

4. Towards a critical project and a project of criticism

Such an “alternative means of production” can never be found in an architecture that renounces to critically assess the territory where it is embedded, the space which it transforms and produces. The question begs for a deeper inquiry into the means, discourses and practices through which architecture can probe and challenge the prevailing processes of territorial production, the mechanisms at play (often violent), the forms of life and modes of existence at stake. Only by establishing a dialogue with this problematic exteriority can one hope to address such fundamental questions – the unstable bond between humans and nature and the revival of artisanal constructive techniques – beyond all fetishization.

In order for this to be possible one must challenge the autophagic consumption that now permeates the commonplace of disciplinary discourse: the cult of minute historical fait divers, the deification of authorship and its backstage creative mechanisms and details, as banal as they may be. In so doing, one must thereby overcome this apparent death in criticism (and its replacement by the curatorial and prize systems) by reviving and assembling both a critical project and a project of criticism.

Studio Mumbai, house in Pali Hill. Photography: Helene Binet.

Afterword. At home – in the inner space of the world – with no threshold

It is difficult to accept Studio Mumbai’s houses as models of reflection on contemporary dwelling. We should rather see them as expressions of a crisis of exteriority that currently afflicts the human. A crisis of experimentation with the world as such, an enclosure towards an outside beyond all culturally dominant mediations. These houses float like lonely commodities that serve the consumption of a voluntary self-immunization. They piercingly announce the ultimate rise of the space of immunitas and the corresponding dissolution of its counterpart: the space of communitas.[4]

If, in these houses, all limits seem dissolved that is solely because the entire exterior has already been interiorized. The threshold fades as an architectural element, losing its meaning and potential for openness, its role of in-between space, of liminal mediation and measure between the house and its exteriority, between the self and the other. That which lies beyond the house remains inside. What is at stake in this dissolution of limits (Gr. Peras) is above all the very dissolution of experience, of the house as experience, because, as the etymological root of the word indicates (Gr. Experientia, ex-per-ientia), there is no experience without a “going beyond”, towards an outside, without the crossing-confrontation of a boundary. Experience is always the experience of a limit, of an unknown. And a house is only a house so long as it achieves to be the place of this liminal experience of the outside – experimentation of the world, for the world.

Therefore, once again paraphrasing Sloterdijk, we can establish that these houses are the inversion of inhabiting: they do not install themselves in an environment, they install an environment of their own. «In this mode of experience the horizon is encountered not as boundary and transition to the outside, but rather as a frame to hold the inner world».

In consequence, we can claim that this is not an architecture of proximity as much as one of absolute distance: an architecture without other and without common. It lives simulated and dissimulated by a nature converted into reassuring and mystifying landscape, incapable of positioning itself in a critical and problematic relation with the surrounding territory. The atmosphere of timelessness in these houses is in no way innocent – they exist in a time that is not of this world. Without present, without past and, especially, without future. These houses are thus paradises from which all mankind has already been banished and from which no redemption can be expected. Finally, in the ultimate glorification of this architecture, the discipline consummates its own dissolution, confirming its absolute estrangement from a world that is now only bearable on the absolute condition of not being visible. “D’emporter le paradis d’un seul coup” [“To carry paradise at the first assault”] was the motto that French writer Charles Baudelaire invoked, rather ironically, in his Artificial Paradises.

—Pedro Levi Bismarck, architect and researcher on the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto. Editor of Punkto Magazine.
Translated by Bárbara Costa and Pedro Levi Bismarck.

—–
[1] “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity”, was the title of the conference held by Bijoy Jain in Porto’s Forum of the Future, 5th November 2015.
[2] According to the World Bank, one third of world population living in poverty is in India: 400 million (30% of Indians), a number growing since 2007. India is a territory stratified and crossed so much by the system of castes as by capitalist processes of spatial production, giving shape to a space where social and economic inequalities are particularly visible.
[3] Expression used by the Indian architect echoing a certain zumthorian geist or spirit. Hortus conclusus was the title of the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion designed by the Swiss architect in 2011.
[4] Roberto Esposito, Communitas. Origene e destino della comunità. Einaudi, 2006.

To resolve such problems, people don’t usually resort to architects. Probably nobody thinks of them as professionals willing to help, or to interpret the case history of a person or a residential community that requires on-the-spot analysis.

Arquitectes de Capçalera (General Practitioners in Architecture) offers the Raval neighbourhood’s neediest residents the possibility of collaboration with future architects in imagining, planning and studying the viability of such changes to their houses and residential buildings, improving both their habitat and relations between them.

The idea is to accompany them in charting their needs and diagnosing possible solutions, guiding them towards the start-up of the necessary rectifications, both in terms of planning and legal management, as well as the obtaining of financial subsidies for implementing them. The idea is to establish close contact, in line with the main goal of reconnecting architecture with society. This is an opportunity to place emphasis on cooperation models where learning intervenes directly in actions directed towards and by citizens.

Arquitectes de Capçalera at Piso Piloto exhibition

In the CCCB’s patio, during the period that the exhibition “Piso Piloto” (Show Home) was running, a Free Residents’ Advice Office opened allowing a limited series of cases to be tackled. A team of students and lecturers from the Housing and City course at Barcelona’s Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAB) was assigned to attend queries from the residents.

At university we are trained in an ABC that supposedly equips us with the instruments necessary to exercise as architects. Diverse and simultaneous study plans show the enormous difficulty in setting basic criteria aiming to make what the profession needs compatible with what is ordered by the European, national or autonomous community regulations, often governed by generalist bases that do not recognise the uniqueness of these studies that swing between the technical, the artistic and the social. Individual teaching units, even individual lecturers, have the responsibility and authority to accentuate the few levers remaining to them in order to gear studies towards wherever they believe is appropriate at a time when the dual crisis – economic and professional – is pushing us to reformulate the fundamentals of architectural training.

Some teaching staff believe that the important thing is to learn techniques consisting of tools and construction elements and supposed laws of composition that allow the planning, and ultimately, the construction of buildings. Others lay stress on cultural and artistic aspects, understanding that an architect acts as a creative director who has essential technical knowledge that allows him to run and coordinate the project’s conceptual and stylistic materialisation. Still others, in contrast, include architecture in a more diffuse field where the architect (whether he builds or not) mediates in a more complex society where technical experience is at the service of a collective aspiration influenced by other agents who demand complicity from the social sciences with the aim of exhausting reality through the design project.

All these simultaneous and complementary visions accentuate the nature of each study plan according to its traditions, and, of course, the labour context in which each operates. Because, let’s not forget, they should all share a common aim: offering studies that guarantee that their students achieve entry into the labour market.

Today, in Barcelona and the rest of the country, this target is far from being reached. One only has to review the statistics to realise the enormous and dramatic difficulties architects face in finding work, not to mention in embarking on their own entrepreneurial adventures.

Some will say that the problem is circumstantial, which means universities do not need to adapt to such ups and downs. “Everything will revert to normal”, they say, suggesting that the architect’s profile need not be substantially modified because sooner or later architects will recover their original status and society will continue needing talented (higher?) technical architects who will retake the sceptre and crown of the built environment. Others demand in-depth revision of the contents and assignments of a profession that has changed forever; whether assuming the remains of a certain technical responsibility, sharing it with other professional collectives that by simplifying and specialising their knowledge have demonstrated the same efficiency, or by demanding of themselves greater commitment to a disaffected society that is demanding bottom-up transformation, where the architect has not yet become fully incorporated as an agent in city policy, or in community management, negotiation or communication processes.

The level of disorientation is considerable and every teaching unit tackles it by emphasising its own criteria. In the case of the ETSAB – undeniably the star of the glory years of a Barcelona influential in architecture and urban design matters – the changes seem to be coming in fits and starts. Left orphaned of reference figures (due to deaths, retirements and departures), today nobody exists who can push and give a unitary sense to an in-depth transformation. In fact, we do not even believe that such a unitary vision is desirable in a profession that has diversified and is increasingly distant from society, and in a school that is in decline (in terms of students, resources and influence) and is resisting the renewal of its structures.

Something similar is happening in the whole of society, where the degeneration of democracy and of political parties is causing a systemic disorder. We are living through a crucial time where citizens who do not feel properly represented are demanding greater participation, transparency and a decided course towards a new model. At the university, which has many qualities of a laboratory but has never completely lost its link to the social reality, in-depth changes are also augured. The first symptoms have been experienced in recent years with emotive assemblies where many students have demanded greater participation in the definition of the studies model, with greater contingency in a pressing reality and with perspectives complementary to that of the invariable builder architect. Hopeful students who continue believing that the university is the best bridge for strengthening the contract that the profession has with a society that, these days, sees us as distracted with a supposed beautification of our environment, under the orders of the political powers or the pressure of runaway capitalism.

And although students are demanding changes, it is surprising that – for example – academic plans on housing are still so close to the “commission” and so distant from the emergencies that are shaking our city and by extension the world. One only has to ask associations such as Cáritas, Arrels, the PAH, Médicos Sin Fronteras, or even the military, how many architects are cooperating with them. But even more important is asking them what added or intrinsic value they believe architects can bring to the vast task of helping improve the habitats of collectives that suffer or are at risk of suffering exclusion and that, today, can not count on us.

They barely need us and this is hard to accept, despite the fact that the raw materials with which they work (subjects and objects) are also concerns of ours. At the university we remain ill-prepared to show capabilities in these issues or rather, we remain unwilling to accept that these matters also form part of our capabilities.

Coderch, in his oft-cited article for Domus in 1961, “It’s not geniuses that we need now”, reminded us of this contract with reality: “Open you eyes wide, look, it is much simpler than you imagine.”

I doubt that it is simpler, but undoubtedly it is more urgent, useful, surprising, impassioned and educational than many of us teachers imagine. Reality outdoes fiction and, in my opinion, the school is living in a determined fiction and being dowsed with a reality imposed by an inherited script that few will be able to put into practice in the future. The architect that does not yet exist (at least in the academic plans) is a different architect who should be able to work without a closed script that prejudges problems and solutions, instead being someone who investigates by opening their eyes wide, converting each project into a kind of documentary where, step by step, the usefulness (and the beauty!) of the project design is described.

The best examples are outside the university, in the hands of multidisciplinary collectives that day by day invent small-scale pilot proposals – real and utopian – that reveal truisms that academia does not see, does not look at, or that are at most relegated to “optional” status. These show us the enormous potential for cooperation in the gestation and co-management of projects with people. Knowing how to ask, demand, communicate and, in short, share knowledge, making private laboratory research work compatible with a clear vocation to open up the process by going down into the ring to contaminate it with harsh reality.

We do not know what will happen with the ETSAB and the ETSAV. Every day new and intriguing voices emerge that augur a progressive disappearance of one or the other, the sale of their premises to reduce the UPC’s enormous debt, cuts in the already miserly financial remuneration of their associated teaching staff, the impossibility of incorporating new staff or the refusal of resources for research projects already under way… Today, inviting somebody to give lecture is fundamentally a commitment based on personal favours that it is difficult to maintain, while publishing anything becomes an exhausting nightmare. The new management at the ETSAB is trying to tackle these evident shortfalls with fresh and promising ideas that we hope will maintain their freshness and a commitment to not justifying changes only through cuts. But I do not believe today that solutions will emerge from subtle adjustments and even less so from internal debates between professional classes who wave the flag of authorship and supposed responsibility for the “commission”.

Political expert Joan Subirats in his article “Repolitizar la Arquitectura” (Repoliticising Architecture), published in El País in relation to the project “Barraca Barcelona” (Barcelona Hut) of 2003, reminded us that from the 1990s onward, architecture abandoned its social and political commitment, becoming solely concerned with stylistic issues. We have abundant evidence of this when we see how the starchitects move around the world taking advantage of the major opportunities offered by a globalised economy and a technology that allows them unprecedented audacity. Architects, like any other technical experts, should start experiencing problems with their conscience if they totally sever technical solutions from social problems or from explicit or implicit objectives in relation to what is requested. We need to introduce politics into what we do and it is imperative that universities accept the challenge of re-politicising architecture and of asking themselves what is the use of what is done, who wins and who loses out because of it, and at the service of what reality we are placing our work.

—Josep Bohigas, architect. Curator of “Barraca Barcelona”, “APTM” and “Piso Piloto” and promoter of Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

In Febrero, 2016, the project Arquitectes de Capçalera has been awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2015. From Quaderns, we want to congratulate all the team and people involved in the project.

More info at Arquitectes de Capçalera

The result is that foreclosures and forcible evictions have left thousands of homes empty and in the hands of financial institutions, while at the same time many thousands of people are denied access to housing by the requirements of the systems of access previously in force, such as that they constitute a stable family, couple or household with an income guaranteed by a permanent employment contract.

In light of the above, housing policies need to be rethought in response to the new conditions, and not only in terms of architectural design but also in terms of programmes, of the people and agencies involved, of systems of tenancy and economic models, and of the structure of the city.

All of this means that housing policies today need to be highly diversified and complementary, pivoting on a series of priority axes:

-The incorporation of empty homes for social use on a rental basis;
-The construction of homes with new models of management, tenancy and morphology-typology;
-Small-scale interventions attuned to the logic of the renovation and rehabilitation of neighbourhoods and actively embracing the different capacities and capabilities of the future residents, not only their ability to pay rent but also their potential for generating work.

In this respect, grassroots citizen’s movements have taken the lead in coming up with workable alternatives. The first of these, in legislative terms, is acceptance of the option of handing back the keys in termination of the mortgage in order to protect people against the situation of total and permanent exclusion, in time and space, in which households unable to meet the repayments find themselves; the guarantee of rehousing; and the fight against exclusion in the form of energy poverty.

Another crucial contribution is being made by experiments with new forms of cooperative organization, which involve active grassroots participation and will result in alternative architectural typologies and construction systems, given that they must adapt from the outset to a real diversity of lifestyles and economic and technical capacities. In this new context of a self-managed cooperative economy, if these homes are not flexible and sustainable then they are not possible. Among the characteristics that are beginning to reveal themselves in the new housing resulting from cooperative and participatory processes is a focus on austerity and efficiency in the space-durability-technology-beauty correlation, in so far as housing is clearly a utility that has no need of the superfluous and the merely cosmetic, the formal qualities of which derive from its essence and its process.

Social rent, directly related to people’s actual economic capacity, is the fairest legal way to implementing the right to adequate housing, in a society which ever fewer people have a permanent work contract, a condition of stability that was the basis for access to housing prior to the collapse of the former model.

This change in policy is essential to address the critical situation created by the system of social precarity that has been imposed by neoliberalism and poses a grave threat to people’s human and social rights.

—Zaida Muxí and Josep Maria Montaner. Montaner is architect and Councillor for Housing, Barcelona City Council; Muxí is architect and Director of Urbanism, Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Council.

/// This text is part of the book Connection_Import Zurich. Cooperative Housing: New Ways of Inhabiting, catalogue of the exhibition with the same name, edited by Nicola Regusci, Xavier Bustos (CCP). First edition dpr-barcelona, 2015.
/// More info about the publication: dpr-barcelona
/// More info about Cities Connection Project, at their web-site.

Exhibition and book launch at COAC on October 22nd, 2015 7pm, Plaça Nova, 5, 08002 Barcelona.

“Time occasionally seems to work in favour of certain ideas, acting as a powerful determinant that accumulates arguments, which in turn allow us to see the usefulness of things that, rather unwisely, we had initially dismissed. The house with equal-sized rooms is probably one of those things and today is one of the formulations that best express what a good house should be. Such a house does not distinguish its rooms by any use assigned to them a priori; in fact, its main virtue is that it leaves the decision on what we will do in them in our hands. The floor plans, structured into rooms of similar sizes, without any well-defined hierarchy, demand our attention now more than ever before for their simple defiance towards the hierarchical house formed by rooms of different sizes – sizes that determine what to do in them and also what not to do. In fact, a house with equal-sized rooms is a way of saying a house made of rooms, nothing more and nothing less.”

And just a couple of weeks ago we found, featured in Horizonte 08, a project by Adam Simpson entitled ‘Boundaries‘. This is a graphic provocation, a floor-to-ceiling artwork, appearing on all sides of an elevator vestibule at the ‘Boundary Hotel’, situated on Boundary Street in East London. But it is interesting to go beyond and think how this graphic work raises some questions about the possibility of a scalable idea of Monteys’ ‘House with Equal-Sized Rooms’ to a urban notion of a city with equal-sized rooms.

Boundaries. Adam Simpson

Adam Simpson is an artist and illustrator, but in the architectural field one evident reference of this idea is the project City Walls. Project for the New Multi-Functional Administrative City in the Republic of Korea, 2005 by Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen. A city designed for 500,000 residents, organised as a sequence of rooms that are formed by ‘city walls’. They ad:

“The city walls are a composition of cruciform buildings that represent two-thirds of the built mass of the city. These ‘walls’ form the habitable architectonic structure of the city. The spaces between the city walls are rooms without content, providing the space for further urban development. The future content is the furniture of the rooms, as it were. The plan seeks to define the form of the city in a rigid manner, without lapsing into the naïve modernistic ideal of the city as a fixed, predetermined organisation of buildings. The city walls and city rooms form the ‘genesis’ of the city, its bare facts. In this manner they fulfil the only role that can be ascribed to architecture: providing a specific inertia against the instability of life itself.”

City Walls. Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen.

City Walls. Dogma and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen.

Even going back in time to 1969, the No-Stop City by Archizoom proposed an endless grid as the basis for a city designed for a society freed from its own alienation; free, therefore, to express in an autonomous way its own creative, political and behavioural energies, as Andrea Branzi described it. In this project, mass society and its correspondent city was envisioned as an endless ocean, with neither a centre and nor frontiers. Branzi wrote:

“In No-Stop City, this social dimension became a spacial dimension [...] the metropolis was seen as one large interior, a single space.”

Hence, the three projects presented here are about cities without architecture, formed by large, anonymous containers divided by walls.

No-Stop City. Archizoom Associati

We want to end by paraphrasing Xavier Monteys, the ground plans of houses cities with rooms of similar sizes represent a way of understanding housing the city that, by reducing the form to such a simple and repetitive expression, places in the hands of the inhabitants the initiative of granting them meaning.

Lotus Park is one of the informal settlements of Cape Town. Almost 1/5th of Cape Town is composed of informal settlements and these are not on the outskirts of the city, but right at the heart of it. Mandela’s admirable restructuring and development program has hardly helped their upgrading, for the reason that the program is top down, formalized and subsidize housing as product, i.e. ignorant to [incremental] processes. Greater transformation projects in country and city scale, like the Cities without Slums [3] and the N2 Gateway project seem to favor capital accumulation but not the inhabitants of the informal settlements. Displacement attempts and protests are regularly on the news. One inhabitant who took us around Lotus Park resembled urban renewal in South Africa to the pressure cooker on the boil. [How] do you do urban upgrading or renewal in such a context?

Edge condition 1: Scrape yard

Edge condition 2: Dwelling production

Mbembe says the most social struggle of these times in South Africa can be read as the attempt towards the right to be urban [4]. In a city like Cape Town, where many are possibly ‘citizens without a city’ [5], the right to the city and the freedom of organizing collective capacities need to go hand in hand towards an open city and society.

Richard Sennett talks about the two main spatial elements of democracy in his reading of ancient Athens [6], Pnyx and Agora: “… the agora consisted of a large open space crossed diagonally by the main street of Athens; at the sides of which were temples and Stoa[s], shed[s] that opened sideways onto the agora… Perhaps the most interesting feature of the stoa and the agora was the transition space just under the shelter of the stoa… What import did the complex, teeming space of the agora have on the practice of democracy?” The agora was the place in the city for the tolerance of difference, diversity: “If the same persons or activities are merely concentrated but remain isolated and segregated, diversity loses its force. To count, differences must interact.” The Athenian agora made different citizens interact in two ways, the second, being the important one in our context: “…the agora established a space for stepping back from such engagement – at the edge, under the roof of the stoa; was a fluid, liminal zone between private and public. This edge was where change would start.”

Edge condition 3: The river, terraces and the neighbouring houses

Edge condition 4: The market

The edge, the stoa is what we are interested in the context of Lotus Park, Cape Town: Touching the neighbourhood on its edge, creating spaces for interaction with the city and the surrounding neighbourhoods, creating potential spaces of diversity at these edges, and expecting this to cause an impact in Lotus Park and Cape Town in the long run. An attempt of transforming the edges of the neighbourhood is also an attempt towards breaking the apartheid’s invisible borders and isolation. In Lotus Park, we propose to realize this transformation through creating collective economical capacity. Many informal settlements also suffer from unemployment, in our case half of the inhabitants of Lotus Park don’t have a job. Organizing the spaces collective economical capacity at the edges of the neighbourhood could increase the sense of ownership/belonging to the neighbourhood, while solving a practical, yet crucial problem of unemployment.

The second wave of post-apartheid urbanization will reshape the nature of cities in South Africa, which will most probably be characterized by the informal settlements and ‘urbanization of poverty’, a mutually reinforcing process, as the place of poverty moves from rural to urban areas6. In our opinion, initiating change at edges by creating spaces of diversity and organizing collective capacities have the potential of translating into an alternative, not only for the informal settlements but the post-apartheid city.

—Merve Bedir. PhD candidate I Delft University of Technology. Partner at Land+Civilization Compositions

[1] Robinson, J. [1996] The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann
[2] UN-Habitat [2010] State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide. Nairobi
[3] The “Cities Without Slums” action plan was developed by the Cities Alliance in July 1999 and launched by Nelson Mandela at the inaugural meeting of the Cities Alliance in Berlin in December 1999: www.citiesalliance.org/cws-action-plan
[4] Mbembe, A. Nuttall, S. [2004] Writing the World from an African Metropolis. Public Culture, 16 [3], 347-372
[5] Appadurai, A. [2002] Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizion of Politics. Public Culture, 14 [1] 21-47.
[6] Richard Sennett describes the details of the spatial prominence of stoa in his article, Democracy and Its Spaces. There, he explains the details of contemporary design projects, which work with the principles of stoa’s transformative spatiality at its edge.

/// Land+Civilization Compositions is involved in the ongoing Density Syndicate project by African Center for Cities and International New Town Institute. This contribution would not have been possible without their invitation. We would also like to thank VPUU, South African NGO for informal settlements.

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.

What follows is Tiago’s article:

Since the troika’s arrival, Portugal has undergone a revolution in the State’s spending structure.

Health and Education are no longer the State Budget’s largest spending areas, with debt payment, the cost of saving a bank and the payment of public-private partnerships (PPPs) gaining prominence. In 2013, 47,50% of the State’s budget was reserved for these last three items, with cuts in Health [27,10%], Education [21,50%] and Social Security [19,90%].

The State tends to disappear as an actor in public and social politics, taking on the role of tax collector for debt payment. It is not hard to imagine that, in the current scenario, there is no place for a national housing policy.
But what is going on with the private sector?

State Budget 2013
. Source: CGTP – Intersindical Nacional.

By virtue of an old law, which froze rents for decades, the real estate renting market dwindled until 2012. Houses to rent were scarce and the prices were prohibitive. The biggest beneficiaries of this imbalance were the banks. Both the financial collapse and the sudden lifting of frozen rents, as demanded by the troika, raised considerable fears, which led to old rents being abruptly bumped up. Thousands of citizens, especially among the aged population, are now having to abandon their lifelong homes.

Although it does not show in the official data, the housing market is in turmoil, with the informal sector echoing this turbulence. A common practice in non-legalized neighborhoods, key-selling, is often the only solution. These operations are carried out outside any and all real estate transaction taxes and do not require the certifications requested by EU directives. All you need to do is hand over the money. Originally an illegal settlement built on the seaside, in an idyllic location 10 km away from Lisbon, the Cova do Vapor neighborhood is an example of this real estate effervescence. With half the neighbourhood duly licensed, it is exactly the houses without legal documents that are available. Key-selling for a 50m2 house might cost between 10.000€ and 20.000€, while legal ones would cost upwards of 50.000€.

The actual size of this market is yet to be studied but it seems clear that the austerity policies being enforced on the country are stimulating a return to the informal. Buying a non-legalized home carries its risks but does not entail a loan, a mortgage, a bank and substantially reduces the value of the investment.

/// *originally created for “Homeland – News from Portugal” newspaper – Portuguese representation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2014
/// All the info about on their web-site homeland.pt

That’s why we are publishing here a text by ateliermob, originally written for “Homeland – News from Portugal” newspaper.

A trial definition

In the academic community, the discussion over what constitutes informal construction is far from over; in fact, it is most commonly perceived as and identified with slums or favelas. If in the case of the former it is not up to us to solve the equation, especially as we do not think the definition should be static, timeless or universal, in the case of the latter, we should decline any attempt to reduce the concept of informality to slums and precarious housing settlements. For the time span between 1914 and 2014, it seems to us that the most accurate understanding of the matter is that informal is everything that is not formal, which is to say, everything that does not fall within the State’s legal sphere, pertaining either private or public initiative.

Departing from a clearly identifiable centre, this broad definition qualifies and groups disparate fringes. We are therefore writing about constructions and neighbourhoods that might even have been properly planned, often by technicians or construction foremen aiding local inhabitants, or that house more than just the most underprivileged social classes.

State of the art

In Portugal, the most thriving periods in informal construction dynamics are linked to historical moments marked both by migratory movements and the ensuing housing problems.

But informal construction is not limited to housing. Depending on the area and neighborhood, we often find workshops, small shops and businesses or rented annexes. If the first step is to build a house, the next is to build an extension or new units associated with work activity or familiar income. These phenomena are less frequent when local residents’ associations are established and given some level of authority over the territory; there are fewer exceptions to housing, and these are usually the local recreational centre, the café, the residents’ association or a building that serves all these purposes.

On the other hand, as a result of Portugal’s financial context, it often happens that formal context is taken by the informal. Portugal Novo neighborhood, designed by Manuel Vicente [1977], is a good example. Over the last couple of years, several members of one gipsy community have settled into the neighborhood and occupied the empty houses, significantly changing their typologies and structure to suit their needs.
In the Portuguese context, it is not easy to identify the overall architectural and morphological characteristics of informal construction. With some exceptions, built structures do not exceed two stories in height and in the case of neighborhoods, copying local built solutions is common practice, in spite of a desire for decorative and identity differentiation.

Also, the geography on which construction takes place is determinant in the choice of building materials and solutions, owing to thermal and weather conditions, financial constraints or the building experience of the site’s construction foremen.
Over the last couple of years, the reality of informal construction in Portugal has been changing. Actually, it is our belief that it is growing in parallel with the country’s economic situation. When we are asked whether there is work for architects in Portugal, our answer is always yes. This is one of the domains where there is a lot to be done.

/// Ateliermob is a multidisciplinary platform for the development of ideas, research and projects in the areas of architecture, design and urbanism. The company was founded in 2005 in Lisbon, as a result of several works carried out by its founding partners. In parallel, they have been developing research work to support the project-oriented practice, an architecture blog, design, urban planning and participation in several national and international competitions. More info: ateliermob