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Architects: Rafael Iglesia
- Area: 1180 m²
- Year: 2001
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Photographs: Gustavo Frittegotto , Manuel Cucurell
Text description provided by the architects. In this project, I tried to highlight two aspects above the others: First, questioning what a housing apartment is, and how it works. Second, solving the structure
The Program
The modern movement did not only leave its aesthetics, but also its ethics: In a dwelling, the specificity of its functions showed us that there was a bedroom for parents (for procreation), and another for children (two, if is that they were of different sexes). This functional specificity is what is questioned in my building, since the family unit is not as big as it used to be, a change that could be traced in ethics, traces that we can not follow here.
Structure
Deleuze introduces a description of the two parties of opposite operations, Chess and Go, a description that can well illustrate two ways of working within Architecture. In an encoded architecture, all its elements function like chess pieces: they have an internal nature or intrinsic properties that make them what they are. Thus, a window is always a window, a door is a door, a beam, a beam, and this was demonstrated with each component. They designed the functions and movements. Each of them is a subject of the enunciation with a relative meaning, the relative meanings are combined in a subject of enunciation.
In my building, I try to achieve the opposite. What I am trying to show are only the beams, treated as simple units whose function is anonymous, collective and a third person, like the pieces of Go. Here, the beams do not become, as elements, subjects with intrinsic properties, but with properties derived from their situation: they can become a wall, a window, a door. Maybe, they will "act" their roles, to support something, and those functions will depend on the place they occupy in space. The beam moves around persistently, building, destroying, bordering, rising and falling, supporting, persisting, leaving and disappearing when least expected, without altering the unit. Within "the Work", the beam can become the hero or the steward, who appears or disappears only when that is required for the destiny to be fulfilled.
