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Global Models
A house represents something of what we are. It is the place which
shelters us and our objects. It is where we accumulate memories,
where we guard our ambitions, desires and anxieties, where we locate
our everyday life, as if it could take tangible form. There is always
the house where we grew up. A house where we studied, where we loved,
or simply, where we were. There is always a house we remember, and
a house where we die. Just as there is always a house we go back
to.
In an apparent contradiction, the walls of
a house enclose the space where we can be free, released from any
social, moral or political constraints; protected by these walls,
we find the space for intimacy. In this sense, the house becomes
a kind of possibility for individual expression of that which belongs
to it: an intimate object.
The Idea of the House presupposes the idea
of living, and therefore the idea of an occupant who makes it a
Home. Where he spends a significant part of his life, where he seeks
physical and mental shelter, and where each citizen may recognize
himself, removed from the rules of social being. This means that
every house is associated with concepts such as privacy, intimacy
and, generally, family.
But a house is also a stage set: it reveals
not only what we are, but what we would wish to be. This makes the
house a vehicle for each person’s representation of himself,
as if each house were a kind of primary external extension of each
of us; superimposing on our most private life an eminently public
dimension.
All these notions of domesticity which influence
the way modern dwellings are organized and function are actually
recent concepts, which have become standard because of the rise
of a middle class capable of demanding its own space, from which
we have inherited a whole system for the organization of domestic
life, which in itself brings a set of rules on living spaces. This
in fact reflects, and imposes, an entire code of social, affective
and behavioural conduct in modern society.
The House is today a kind of stereotype, a
common place which we nonetheless accept as our own.
Local Houses
But we know that all the changes which have
taken place in Portugal over recent decades have interfered decisively
with our collective and individual lifestyles and habits. The frontier
between local and global has been watered down, the division between
public and private has become hazy, we manipulate materials with
the same agility we apply to digital media, we transform the organic
into the technological. Of the social fabric of thirty or forty
years ago, we are left with only revivalisms and anachronisms.
As we have changed our consumer and leisure
habits, levels of education and culture, dogmas, models and ideas,
our collective space is expressed increasingly in the singular.
And each individual’s worth is measured, above all, by that
which distinguishes him from those around him.
In this sense there is a clear paradox between standard housing
– everyday space – and the need to individualize it.
Whilst each person seeks his meaning in that which is his, and unique,
all his space should reflect this: a space which reflected his own
nature and habits. A space which would be moulded to his ways and
customs, which served his needs, and which somehow reflected his
way of reflecting that which surrounds him.
The standard habitat model clashes with the
attributes of the contemporary world. And this is visible in the
normalization of types and images (flying in the face of individuality),
and also, perhaps more simply, in the contradiction in terms in
relation to that which each habitat offers today to the contemporary
person. Because if all the changes which have taken place in fields
as distinct as psychology, the arts, politics, religion, sexuality
and anthropology bring with them consequences for the changing dynamics
of nuclear families, this is not reflected in our everyday spaces.
If there is any conclusion to draw from all
this, it is that we live in a physical space that is not ours (any
more).
Portuguese House
With the advent of modern age the House became
the most meaningful matter of study in the development of Architecture,
allowing a laboratorial inquiry concerning the application of ideas,
concepts, and construction technologies. Due to the reduced scale
and the constant evolution of its functional program, the House
represents, for Architecture, a kind of prototype; providing a physical
extension of theoretical manifestos, specially in the outcoming
of the modern vanguards.
What we demanded the twelve architecture authors was that they could
use this prototype condition of the House as a possibility of experimentation
and revision of models and concepts related to the contemporary
habitat; having as work substance the Portuguese reality –
Today…
It was suggested to each participant a set
of purposes that should fit their own inquiries. Statistical data
allowed to identify the Portuguese standard family, the main used
tipology, the average constrution cost, and the type of technology
associated with unifamiliar house construction.
The experience we present here pressuposes the understanding of
the habitacional cell, and it’s role in the contemporary Portuguese
society. This means an investigation about the qualities of the
spaces wich normaly compose a house, their internal centrality,
the links and disjunctions wich they propose to lodge our daily
life.
This means that the spaces reflect the way
they connect between them. In this typological model remains our
ability to understand habits, relations, and behaviours of a typical
portuguese family. As if the house was the minimum cell of the whole
society in analysis.
However, more than a simple inquiry experience,
The Portuguese House intends to diffuse the newest portuguese architectural
reality. This means that each one of the twelve Portuguese Houses
was based in a real comission, obeying the usual constraints of
the architectural production, specially those concerning cost control,
forms and constructive technologies to be implemented.
The exhibition The Portuguese House will give
origin to a experimental quarter in the Empreendimento Corte Real,
nearby Sarilhos Pequenos village, in the Moita Council, being part
of a Local Development Strategy. The main aim of this inquiry is
to evaluate the market: each one of the twelve houses will be for
sale, not exceeding the current values of real estate market.
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