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Self-Sufficient
Housing: 1st Advanced Architecture Contest, edited
by Vicente Guallart.
For the Institute
for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia's (IaaC) 1st
Advanced Architecture Contest, the theme was self-sufficient
housing. Although physically impossible (something I'll
ignore in this review), the theme asked students and architects
to think of the house as "a living organism that interacts
with its environment, exchanging resources, and which functions
as an entirely independent entity." Perhaps in response
to this last characteristic -- the definition of self-sufficiency
-- many of the proposals lack a real context; in many cases
the context is an abstract plane, sometimes mapped and populated
with "green," a further nod to the contest's role
in the greater sustainability movement sweeping much of
architecture's critical thinking these days.
Does this abstraction mean that dealing
with context is too much for designs that purport to function
independently? To this reviewer they cannot be separated,
as the ability to design a house that creates energy for
its functions, recycles its water in a relatively closed
loop, enables food to be grown for the inhabitants, and
other considerations must respond to the house's location.
This isn't to say that some of the entries don't root themselves
in specific contexts (many do), but the ones that do are
the most successful. Of the four winning designs (three
for single-family and one for multi-family), all of them
are sited in a specific location and all of them take cues
from their context in their designs. For example, the first-place
single-family design proposes "a solution of continuity
with what already composes a place...an extension of the
environment that surrounds it," specifically rice terraces.
To remove the context from the project would nullify its
idea entirely.
The danger in approaching projects
like the self-sufficient house without regards for context
is thinking of design(s) as universal, like the International
Style or Le Corbusier's Machine for Living. Design is not
universal, though in the case of this competition it should
be the application of universal principles, such
as using the sun to heat and cool and create energy or using
local materials, to a specific context. In this book projects
with that approach are the best projects, outshining the
rest and making me hopeful as the IaaC undertakes its 2nd
Advanced Architecture Contest, the "Self-Fab House."
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