Immeuble M'House
Nantes, France, 1997-2000
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Actar Arquitectura | Manuel Gausa (*1959) | Oleguer Gelpi (*1964) | Ignasi Pérez Arnal (*1965) | Florence Raveau (*1965) | Marc Aureli Santos (*1960)
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Antitypes Architecture has been used for a long time to design objects. These days, it must be concerned with relationships. It must project not unambiguous forms (compositions) but plural "contracts" between places and events (arrangements). These arrangements suggest both combinations and distributions in space, as well as flexible forms of logic [...]. Their effectiveness lies in the sound design of their operating system : the specific logic of relationship and internal combination ; articulation and infrastructure ; the mechanism of exchange and "glocal" relationship (between individual interests-local-and combined objectives-global). This hybrid and at times "anti-natural" contract, which can bring together in one and the same project differing formation codes, in fact refers to the actual division between the parties to the project and the contemporary city : twinned crystals, cuttings, grafts, and pairings are all recent-anti-compositional-illustrations which convey undisciplined, impure and indeterminate orders and "eccentric" forms (uncentered but also extreme and cursory, almost spontaneous) in continuity with the particular interpretation of a space, that of the present-day Metapolis, which can only be effectively represented by the changeable, opportunistic and unprejudiced overlay of different and differentiated layers and networks (as is the case with scanner readings and GIS maps). In a way, these contracts are "antitypes", associated with scenarios once and for all devoid of any formal typification ; antitypes in which, as in the contemporary world, different layers of movements, actions and activities overlap, no longer in the form of harmonic and coherent bodies, but of simultaneous landscapes in which "commensal" structures, forms and identities co-exist. This is how we like to see ACTAR : like a strange antitype ; a singular project issuing from the desire to bring together personalities, callings and fields of activity that are apparently diverse, but in fact linked : architectonic project and publishing project ; creation and distribution ; forward-looking action and critical eye. Dichotomies akin to others traditionally associated with the definition of the contemporary city and space (man-made/natural, urban/territorial, public/private, style/content, solid/void) ; dichotomies which have suddenly blurred the strict limits and given way to new and operative binomials or pairs. Mixed realities brought about by associations, transversalities and unexpected connections : LINKS. It is precisely this desire for linkage that explains and orders ACTAR's hybrid identity and activity, oriented towards the interpretation and treatment of a complex space, subject to new technical and phenomenological conditions-keys to a specific environment and new scales of processes occurring therein ; keys to the cultural phenomena of a thoroughly metropolitan (global) scenario, but one also attuned to the interests of the particular, the singular and the individual (local) ; keys leading to other types of arrangements based on direct forms of-disinhibited-ogic, rather than to orthodox prefigurations, to the revaluation of situations rather than to their design, and to the creation of strategies (capable of encompassing complexity) rather than to the formulation of constructions. Manuel Gausa |
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Immeuble M'House Nantes, France, 1997-2000 |
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This project is presented like a "menu" of interchangeable modules. These modules, which form a 0.90 x 4.50 meters grid on the ground, with a height of 2.80 meters, result from a fixed structural section, carefully studied so as to permit their lateral and vertical assembly, and the subsequent incorporation of floor, façade and partition units made of different materials, and with diverse textures and colours. They can be combined by juxtaposition and superposition, and offer a limitless number of configurations based on the variation of a limited number of standard spaces and flexible technical elements (accumulators, fitted walls, vertical circulation systems...). The shape of this "à la carte" building is not based solely on the choice of colour and the outside silkscreening but also on the particular and custom-built design of the standard. The theme of the "catalogue house" is based here on a relationship between industry and design, designed to encourage cheap, quick and simple systems, and technical solutions that are precise and open alike. This construction, which can always be reversed, draws up an implicitly time-related "contract" with the landscape. | |
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Barcelona Land Grid Barcelone, Espagne, 1996-1999 |
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This work of territorial investigation was presented as part of the exhibition : "1856-1999 : Barcelona Contemporania" held at the Contemporary Cultural Centre in Barcelona, in 1995. It's aim was to draw up an active and functional mapping of the metropolitan-and even metapolitan-area of Barcelona, a reading of the poly-nuclear reality in which it is inscribed today. Based on the idea of a flexible mesh, it reveals the presence of an infrastructural and landscape-oriented grid, closely bound up with the geography and articulating the territory. Once identified, this "land grid", which is at once description and project may, according to Actar, become the medium of a strategy of urban and territorial restructuring taking into account the complexity of the specific situations, processes and conditions of the contemporary metropolis : movements, relations and interconnections, but also differential relations between city and nature, between colonized spaces and preserved spaces, between global and local. |
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70 logements au Mont Hacho Ceuta, Espagne, 1998 |
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This housing project, clinging to the sides of Mount Hacho, forming a natural amphitheatre looking over the Mediterranean, was designed as part of Europan 1999, where it was a finalist. Through an experimental transposition of literary narrative in architecture, Actar decided to "recount" a host of particular stories in one and the same coherent grid : a landscape of terraces, surfaces, colours, textures and even many different viewpoints. Each unit is designed on the basis of a square 4 x 4 meters module-corresponding to the optimization of industrial prefabrication criteria-and a semi-fitted "service wall". This latter, containing bathtubs, basins, toilets, cupboards, kitchen modules, work surfaces and even stairways, works like a backbone along which there may be all the distri-butive and typological variations. This arrangement should permit a flexible and programmed adaptation to the individual backgrounds of the residents. |
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Place Picasso Montornés
de Vallès |
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The challenge of this project is to turn a large residual and irregular empty space, in the middle of Montornés de Vallès, into a public place, into a truly "relational" space. Here, rather than proposing a unitary and comprehensive design, Actar's intent is to develop an open system, capable of conveying diversity: not only organizing a space but also revealing its potential status as a "place of places". The project is presented as the blending of a lengthwise system of "typological" strips-a street, a square, a passage, a grove of trees, a path-and a crosswise system of functional grids-an esplanade for collective activities, a playground, a pond and its beach, clearings and craters for more individual pastimes. This interference is emphasized by an almost calligraphic intervention on the ground, i.e. by differentiated treatments of its colours, textures and materials, going with gradations between the busyness of the urban space and the inner quality of the grove of trees.
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Actar Arquitectura Manuel
Gausa (1959) Oleguer
Gelpi (1964) Ignasi
Pérez Arnal (1965) Florence
Raveau (1965) Marc
Aureli Santos (1960) Principaux projets et réalisations 2000
– "M'House" 5 maisons, Nantes, France (projet) Publications récentes d'Actar 1999
– "In-Ex 01" éditions Birkhaüser verlag – In-Ex
projects, Paris / Berlin ; "Single housing" éditions Actar / Birkhaüser
verlag, Barcelone / Berlin ; "Punto de encuentro – Teffpunkt Zürich"
catalogue de l'exposition Architektur Forum, Zürich ; "Wohnlandschaften"
Werk, Bauen+Wohnen (1/2), Zürich ; "Housing : More for less" Dau
7, Barcelone ; "Territorio vibratil : reconocimiento en clave de accion"
Bau 14, Madrid |