The projects being shown in the exhibition will be grouped within six themes acting as a framework for discussion at the round tables. In no instance, however, does this pigeonholing have anything dogmatic about it: the categories worked out are not foolproof; and there may be shifts from one to another. What is proposed here is a reading key, aimed at highlighting different attitudes to the architecture of housing.
•1)
Individualizing collective housing
This concern has become more or less run-of-the-mill, encompassing, as
it does, a set of issues associated with the city and with places where
there is a premium on space. In most instances, the issue is raised in
terms of space-saving. The answer is usually conveyed by an increase in
density. How is density to be increased and the hetereogeneity of population
groups to be taken into consideration? How is unity to be retained in
terms of urban development, and how is the community-oriented idea to
be preserved by favouring a diverse range of appropriation methods, permitting
their evolution? How is the public place to be reconciled with the need
for an identity-based space?
•2) Flexibility
Flexibility was a popular theme in the 1970s. Thirty years later, this
concern is re-remerging, though set forth in different terms.
Do-it-yourself and the open form, where the daily round is dictated by
use, have replaced "architectless architecture".
"The industrialization of the building" ushered in the design
of housing units with moveable partitions, offering multi-purpose areas.
Today, industrialized production methods are veering towards the possibility
of formulating unusual propositions based on assemblage amd the combination
of prefabricated modular parts.
"Cooperation and consultation with users", aimed at embracing
individual and collective wishes within the design, has taken on different
forms as a result of the new communication technologies, helping towards
a real collaboration between architects and their clients.
•3) Creating the landscape
For some people, presence in place is crucial. The landscape becomes a
binding feature between architecture and nature. Housing belongs to the
place where it is erected. It is buried and becomes landscape, incorporating
the context; it invents the landscape, and glorifies it, rising up to
break with it, or alternatively be in continuity with it. It creates another
territory, or turns into metaphor, in memory of vanished activities.
•4) New lifestyles, today and tomorrow
As a response to the emergence of new lifestyles associated with living
conditions, reprogramming strategies are being introduced, stemming from
day-to-day reality, taking uses, and the way they are overlaid, into account,
to the point of proposing an architecture that has a make-believe, anticipatory
value.
What is appearing is a non-standard conception of housing, not trying
to get values across or express them, but meeting current requirements,
and at the same time being in a position to adapt to the evolution of
life.
What also appear are new forms, claiming to respond to an announced, nomadic,
de-territorialized lifestyle, turning housing into an extension of the
body, where space is made the best possible use of; it also sidesteps
the natural landscape and, at will, rebuilds another that is virtual and
modulable.
•5) Subversion
This should be understood here as an attitude that blurs practices, and
hijacks procedures and tools. Challenging constructive customs, getting
round the rules and regulations, subverting conventional forms: all these
things conspire to dismantle accepted ideas of their own praxis and, by
contamination, underpin a critical discourse on the contemporary world:
a harsh or, alternatively, hushed objection, which may take shape on the
borderline of legality or, conversely, take the path of a pragmatic practice,
and turn the derisory into a positive tool.
•6) Form--Creative process
Over and above issues to do with housing, form or, rather, the creative
process, is still the major concern in design, for some people.
Form may be the outcome of technological manipulation, a choice of structure
and material, a way of handling the volume, the plan, or alternatively,
the product of a self-generating system. Architecture may result from
the context, and from overlaid territories which disorganize the form.
In some instances it incorporates the effects of time and climate, and
turns into landscape.
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