Houses for Whom?: Between the Habitat and the Inhabiting, on Henri Lefebvre’s Quest (original) (raw)
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Inhabiting the present: The house, the collective dwelling and the city
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 10TH WORKSHOP ON METALLIZATION AND INTERCONNECTION FOR CRYSTALLINE SILICON SOLAR CELLS
Residential architecture is the first and most difficult way of making architecture. Apart from being one of the most urgent needs in people's lives, it also represents one of the most legitimate aspirations of human beings, whatever their social condition. Housing is the greatest exponent of architecture; it means working with human beings and their needs. The nature of our dwelling, regardless of the type of culture and time period, conveys an undistorted vision of the human condition. In that sense, housing has always shaped the quality of human life. A good dwelling is one in which we can live well. Its essential quality is that of being livable. Since domestic dwelling cohabits mainly with private life, the value of housing lies primarily in its capacity to convey the feeling of shelter / protection and of a discrete relationship between the 'interior' spaces themselves; its architectural value lies in the capacity that the spaces themselves have to express, through their form, this relationship. The house problematic is wide and complex, it requires technical, artistic and functional knowledge, and a clear vision of the new values and social needs of our time-new means to improve people's lives. The present document aims to clarify the following concepts and the gradual relationship between them-the house, the collective dwelling and the city. To this end, a first approach will be made to the relationship between the concept of house, home and the inhabitant, and subsequently, a progressive passage to collective living and its interaction with the city.
Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Introduction)
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Shows how Lefebvre’s theory of space developed out of direct engagement with architecture, urbanism, and urban sociology. In this innovative work, Łukasz Stanek frames a uniquely contextual appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s idea that space is a social product. Stanek explicitly confronts both the philosophical and the empirical foundations of Lefebvre’s oeuvre, especially his direct involvement in urban development, planning, and architecture. Stanek offers a deeper and clearer understanding of Lefebvre’s thought and its implications for the present day.
Architecture, Space and Ideology: Between Adorno and Lefebvre
Serbian Architectural Journal, 2018
Can architecture become a site of resistance to the machinery of estrangement and alienation? The German philosopher Theodor Adorno found art, where he included specific forms of architecture, to be the only exit from the dominance of machinery of the total system. If architecture in Adorno's philosophy could, with its negative position, step behind the screens into an autonomous art, the French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, developed a more radical notion: the distinctive scenery of architecture, everyday life, is intensely subjected to alienation. As much as Lefebvre puts focus on abstract and social space as a specific production of social relations, he also argued that every architecture is a priori ideological. Introducing the status architecture was given by Adorno and Lefebvre in the age of the birth of neoliberalism, thus paralleling the concepts of cultural industries with arts, social with abstract space, the paper outlines the basic entry point of two distinctive representatives of Neo-Marxism into architecture, in order to suggest an epistemology of architecture, which starts at a foremost critical point.
Sustainable Dwelling. Between Polyvalence and Empowerment, 2019
In a context of increasing individualization of our societies, dwelling has developed to become largely a personal feat. Hence, housing can no longer be considered exclusively from a traditional household perspective. Given this context, a combined analysis – both spatial and social - of several housing projects was carried out by researchers in architecture and the humanities. Two projects - La Sécherie in Nantes and Kalkbreite in Zurich - were selected for their use of a particular conception principle: ‘reduction/extension’. This principle implies organizing a dwelling between two poles: a reduced domestic nucleus and a series of additional spaces. Based on this principle, a multiplicity of dwelling configurations can be imagined. All are grounded on the idea that living could take place beyond the traditional limits of housing. Combined with a spatial analysis, a post-occupancy exploration was carried out in both projects, shedding light on the constraints but also the potential of the ‘reduction/extension’ principle. The benefits of this ‘reduction/extension’ principle are twofold. First, dwelling can evolve given the constellation of possible housing configurations. Second, inhabitants are able to make their own dwelling choices. This combination of domestic polyvalence and dwellers’ empowerment is a key for sustainable housing designs.
Out of Conceived Space: For Another History of Architecture
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This paper discusses two processes of production of space and how historiography of architecture relates to them. The first one is based on professional design of extraordinary spaces (monuments) and is widespread during the 20th century, even in the design of ordinary buildings. We understand it through Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conceived space’: the architect’s intellectual work dominates the builder’s manual work by means of abstract concepts, tools and codes. Its products are the objects of prevailing histories of architecture reinforcing the very concepts used before. In contrast, the second process relates to Lefebvre’s ‘lived space’. It is collective and cooperative, characterized by people’s engagement and negotiation on nonhierarchical building-sites, in which design, building and use are simultaneous. It creates everyday spaces in constant change, such as Brazilian favelas. Prevailing histories of architecture do not include this second process, because there are no concepts, scho...
Productive Universals–Specific Situations. Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture and Urbanism, 2019
The following stage play features a fictional conversation between people of radically different cultural and social backgrounds on the question of living together in the collective high-rise housing of Paris’s banlieues. Its object is Les Espaces d’Abraxas (hereafter: Abraxas), a monumental neo-historic housing complex of about 600 apartments realized between 1978 and 1983 in the new town Marne-la-Vallée by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill and his office Taller de Arquitectura. Publicized as one of the first visible manifestations of postmodernism in France1 and subsequently used as a backdrop for several dystopian Hollywood movies—Brazil (1984), The Hunger Games (2015)— the associations related to this building range from a penal colony to a surreal dream. The main subject of this conversation, however, is not the building and its spectacular façade, but the transformation of collective housing during the social and political upheavals that occurred in France and other northern European countries after thirty years of welfare state provision came to an end. Apart from being a postmodern icon, Abraxas is also an exemplary case of the consequences of the debt crisis that ensued in France after the neoliberal reforms of 1977. Its accelerated decline in less than a decade resulted from the mortgage credits with which it was marketed: their flexible interest rates led to the bankruptcy of Abraxas’s housing company in 1985. On the other hand, the building complex conveys intentions of welfare state policies of social redis- tribution and was built by procedures that emerged out of the logic of Fordist production. Its eclectic pillared façade made out of prefabricated concrete panels originates in the mass housing pro- duction of the postwar boom years; and its seemingly excessive monumentality can be traced back to the ambition of the Parisian new town planners of the 1960s to structure the Paris region with modern, thriving centralities that were to fulfill not only a right to housing, but also a the “right to the city. This play confronts the memories of Abraxas’s first generation of inhabitants—which I collected in narrative biographic interviews during a six-month stay in the building in 2012—with the cultural discourse that constructed it and which permeates its social spaces. Taking the lived experience of the inhabitants as a starting point and situating the discussion inside the building changes the viewpoint from which the narrative of the demise of the social housing high- rise is usually told. The resulting polylogue of testimony and stories as well as excerpts from publications explores the emancipatory potential of discourse, which occurs at the moment when this dis- course opens up towards what, for the sake of its functioning, has to be kept outside. Torn out of context, oral statements and fragments of sentences can lose their original meaning, but their reassembly creates new relations between otherwise often incommensurable registers of speech. I have left temporal incongruencies intention- ally unresolved: discursive utterings, which extend over a time span of fifty years, remain in the present tense whereas the memories of inhabitants recalling in 2012 their experience of the 1980s and 1990s are narrated in the past tense. Finally, my own voice as an author is transmitted in the stage directions that transform Abraxas and the new town center of Mont d’Est into a stage set and thereby into a central agent of this piece. “Architecture,” then, becomes an instance that occurs in specific settings and exists only within the simultaneous entanglement of practice and representation within which it makes sense.
Exploring Lefebvre´s Dialectics of Space and The Right to the City
Exploring Lefebvre´s Dialectics of Space and The Right to the City, 2018
This paper intends to contribute to the debate on the right to the city by expanding on the concept of space and by building on Lefebvre’s theory of Production of Space. In addition, it aims to convey the complexity of the concept coherently by articulating the various types of space through the review of Lefebvre’s dialectics of space. Ultimately, the goal is to close the existing gap between the concept of space and the development of the right to the city.
The theme of inhabiting in high-density buildings has been widely investigated since the Mid-Twentieth century. Still, original researches are now opening new perspectives, creating a common ground in which urban planning and architecture increasingly intersect with studies based on participation, urban policies and spatial justice. The failure of some of the iconic Twentieth-century architectures rose a strong debate that often resulted in their demolition. This process was primarily dictated by market logic, by a change in the residents and, above all, by the lack of all the services needed to build a community. Some experimental alternatives to replacing neglect building complexes have emerged especially in France and Northern Europe. The paper presents a selection of residential projects by Lacaton & Vassal, Mikhail Riches and LAN (Local Architecture Network), which use architectural drawings to propose innovative solutions to local administrations, as well as to initiate planning processes involving resident communities.