Office for Political Enhancement Andrés Jaque Arch.

Espumas Democráticas in Habitat/Variations, Geneve. Curated by María Inés Rodríguez

2007-12-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

issue for contemporary architects raised as a summer entertainment

2007-05-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

El Niuton

2007-05-30T04:29:00.000-07:00

EL NIUTON (páginas 273-299)

UNAUFGERÄUMT / AS FOUND

2007-05-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

UNAUFGERÄUMT / AS FOUNDUNAUFGERÄUMT / AS FOUND,

17.3. – 27.5.2007

Swiss Architecture Museum Basel, Steinenberg 7, 4051 Basel

Mark of guaranties

2007-05-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

Parliament Architectur

First mark of democratic quality for architectural actions

The Office for Political Enhancement have developed the first mark of democratic quality for architectural actions : Parliament Architecture.

Which was first conceded to the works on Cidade da Cultura de Galicia, directed by Peter Eisenman Architects and UTE Euroestudios-Andrés Perea Ortega, proves that a particular architectural process has taken into account the warranties of representation and transparency required to both public and private actions in the European Union realm. The Office for Political Enhancement itself reviews and implements construction processes that require the quality seal and develops protocols and devices to guarantee that the architectural process fits into these categories:

Compulsory Pass Point: technological objects that establish –without unifying or setting a consensus- alliances (whatever they last) between actors with ideologies, expectations, interests, desires, evolution times and aesthetic codes that are not only different but also contradictory or opposing. Technological compulsory pass point objects are parliaments where actors are politically represented and become privileged intermediaries, necessarily present when the association is put into practice. Examples: the heavy key rings of hotel rooms represent simultaneously the desire of the manager so the keys won’t get lost and the guest´s to leave the hotel without worries or minor inconveniences.

Scrutiny Object: Technological system equipped with automatic mechanisms of monitoring, allowing the registration and constant evaluation of its performance. It means a change in the construction paradigm: the passing from an exemplary object (prototype) into a laboratorized object (an object of uncertainty) . also, the passing from the architect as an expert, to the architect as time manager. Examples: the highways network or TV audiences.

Political Transparency: It is not the transparency of building materials or direct exposition of technological systems. It’s the quality of those objects equipped with devices that allow to people not involved in its design and promotion, to see its behaviour, to evaluate the consequences of the operation or even to gain access to its transformation. Example: window interfaces in personal computers that show simple images instead of directly exposing the visual appearance of circuitry or the software code used, in order to let the users have the control over them.

Concierno Object: Object that incorporates in its constitution public concerns that could be activated by its production, use or transformation processes. Examples: products distributed in the Fair Trade network, contributing to better economic conditions and the promotion of civil rights in countries with conflicts, or still developing. Liability Terminal: Object which has decision-making options so users can modify the ethic behaviour of the object about politically disputed issues. Example: the box to contribute funding of Catholic Church when filling one's income tax in Spain.

Quality Network: Technological system provided with protocols to enrol users in a community of evaluation and implementation of the system. It incorporates the contributions of users regarding the design and the updates. It also makes possible the reconstruction of user’s daily life thanks to the cultural capital. All this, while creating affective bonds between users. Example: Wikipedia.

Interview with A. Jaque, A10 #15

2007-05-14T05:12:00.000-07:00

Parliament Architecture

2007-05-14T05:07:00.000-07:00

Parliament Architecture
first seal of democratic quality for architectural actions

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/

Complementary text to the article Wanna sleep with common people? Quality notions for a Parliament Society, written by Andrés Jaque for ARQUITECTURA COAM publication.

The Office for Political Enhancement Andrés Jaque Architects have developed the first seal of democratic quality for architectural actions : .
This seal of democratic quality, which was first conceded to the works on Cidade da Cultura de Galicia, directed by Peter Eisenman Architects and UTE Euroestudios-Andrés Perea Ortega, proves that a particular architectural process has taken into account the warranties of representation and transparency required to both public and private actions in the European Union realm. The Office for Political Enhancement itself reviews and implements construction processes that require the quality seal and develops protocols and devices to guarantee that the architectural process fits into these categories:

Compulsory Pass Point: technological objects that establish –without unifying or setting a consensus- alliances (whatever they last) between actors with ideologies, expectations, interests, desires, evolution times and aesthetic codes that are not only different but also contradictory or opposing. Technological compulsory pass point objects are parliaments where actors are politically represented and become privileged intermediaries, necessarily present when the association is put into practice. Examples: the heavy key rings of hotel rooms represent simultaneously the desire of the manager so the keys won’t get lost and the guest´s to leave the hotel without worries or minor inconveniences.

Scrutiny Object: Technological system equipped with automatic mechanisms of monitoring, allowing the registration and constant evaluation of its performance. It means a change in the construction paradigm: the passing from an exemplary object (prototype) into a laboratorized object (an object of uncertainty) . also, the passing from the architect as an expert, to the architect as time manager. Examples: the highways network or TV audiences.

Political Transparency: It is not the transparency of building materials or direct exposition of technological systems. It’s the quality of those objects equipped with devices that allow to people not involved in its design and promotion, to see its behaviour, to evaluate the consequences of the operation or even to gain access to its transformation. Example: window interfaces in personal computers that show simple images instead of directly exposing the visual appearance of circuitry or the software code used, in order to let the users have the control over them.

Concierno Object: Object that incorporates in its constitution public concerns that could be activated by its production, use or transformation processes. Examples: products distributed in the Fair Trade network, contributing to better economic conditions and the promotion of civil rights in countries with conflicts, or still developing.

Liability Terminal: Object which has decision-making options so users can modify the ethic behaviour of the object about politically disputed issues. Example: the box to contribute funding of Catholic Church when filling one's income tax in Spain.

Quality Network: Technological system provided with protocols to enrol users in a community of evaluation and implementation of the system. It incorporates the contributions of users regarding the design and the updates. It also makes possible the reconstruction of user’s daily life thanks to the cultural capital. All this, while creating affective bonds between users. Example: Wikipedia.

Tecno-Geisha

2007-05-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

Transparent object or evening picnic with a techno-geisha by Andrés Jaque

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non-commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
First Published: [pp.1,44-47 Pasajes de arquitectura y crítica. n.66 Madrid marzo 2005]Contact: oficina@andresjaque.com
Translation: Pablo Hurlé, pablo@andresjaque.com

Tromso´s Holy Shroud

Last summer I had an agreement with Norwegian architect Annike Romuld to participate in the following game: she would send me a shoe box and I would have to construct with its content, throughout the summer, what we called architectural situations.
I received a box wrapped in rag paper, with white folded fabric of 6 x 0,4 meters, with a hem of 6 millimetres in all the perimeter. Annike was sending an object proper of architectural orthodoxy.
The white fabric was a polished, clean and a bit classic object, without apparent ideology. There was no track of the manufacturing process or its market value, nor the guarantees and risks that it was offering. It was an autonomous object from conception, claiming to be the centre of its own reality. Or using the term coined by Donald Judd: an specific object.[1]

During the summer Claudia Picazo and I studied in what sequence the fabric was doubled, observing the direction of the intersections between folds. Where did the hem start and into what points the bobbin of thread was changed. We calculated the market value and the manufacturing cost.
We learned that in the process intervened two persons, who worked in a table of approximately 1,60 x 0,80 meters, and that there was a dog in the place. They took more than three hours in cutting, connecting, finishing it off and folding the fabric. The detection of particles through electronic microscopy and the analysis of substances by spectrum processing of different fragments of the fabric revealed the biological map of a typical Scandinavian house. And the small stains of red wine, an attitude of celebration and probably the whole work ethics.

The fabric, which we are now calling Tromso's Holy Shroud, is not white or empty anymore. We have embroidered it indicating the tracks of the actions that were performed into it. And also of the associations between the fabric and the processes it is a part of. It has lost its uniqueness and probably something of its respectable and charming autonomy. But in exchange, using the terminology that Joseph Stiglitz[2] has popularised, it has gained in transparency.

Was in einem Thomson-Gerät so alles drinsteckt[3]
In one of his first works, still as an advertising photographer, beside an open Thomson radio showing its internal mechanisms, Andreas Gursky asked himself: What’s on the inside of a Thomson device in order to make everything possible? It is a question of a piece of work - manifest that could explain in great length subsequent work. Behind the led screens with the changing quotations of values there were rooms where purchases and sells were negotiated vociferously, as its series of markets make visible. The safety of the hermetic prisms in Düsseldorf's office blocks depended on the simple decision of putting two janitors in order to keep an eye on each other, as proved in the Security Guards series.
Gursky's work, as a whole, is an unfolding of the organizational mechanisms in post-industrial western society that answers to the project of unblackboxing a context we all use without really understanding how it works.
Like in Tromso's Holy Shroud, Gursky's work is not so much about creating but revealing. And not so much about activating ideologies but creating the frame or the conditions needed in order to make visible the concealed operations.

The dissolution of the opaqueness of the object has been a constant worry in the 20th century architecture and the term transparency has been venerated as one of the props of modernity. As Rowe and Slutgky pointed out in their famous essay of the seventies, both in the transparency associated with the physical translucency of the material, and the one related to the overlapping of geometric orders of different nature, there is a desire to manage the ambiguous and ambivalent condition of objects.[4]
For Gyorgy Kepes " The transparency implies the simultaneous perception of different spatial locations ".[5] One utility of the transparency, about combining evaluations and diverse interpretations of reality - defined from different positions-, leads to the present time of architecture, unavoidable worries in the political and ecological current thought, partly taken from the economy of the information.

Fabian Muniesa[6], in reference to Rowe and Slutgky´s work, state the appearance of new ways of transparency: To be transparent is not only the physical transparency of materials or the overlapping of contradictory geometric systems. There are new ways of transparency that, like glass did back in its day, brings new possibilities to think about the transformation of the man environment. New definitions that centre the debate of architecture on the role it plays in the construction of the citizen and in the capacity of the constructed environment of becoming the support of a participative citizenship.

Automatic Fabric or evening picnic with a techno-geisha

About one year ago we worked several months in the construction of a suit which partly contained the keys of the contemporary city. It was a suit with a meadow of lawn following the tradition of urban parks and a capsule that swells up itself to create a space of intimacy. It also had a gas bottle connected to the burner of a kitchen, an autonomous lighting system and a store of objects.

From the beginning we decided to call it Automatic Fabric because, instead of assigning spatial enclosures to the different activities, the suit adapted itself activating different infrastructures that created the conditions in which, in automatic way, different uses were possible. We asked for help to conceptual artist Alicia Ríos, authoress of the first protocol of urbanofagia, to do the first test in a collective picnic in the Doméstico gallery.

Alicia manipulated the suit in a sequence of urban uses. She was the hostess of the city who, as a techno-geisha, modified her attire in a program of available usefulness. Our work wasn’t so much to construct a suit, but a host's role. Or, said differently, designing an agent who acted creating links between the participants. An agent with a mission: to construct associations among the participants in the event, the coffee, the buns and a transformable suit. An association that would last until it wasn’t favourable for all, up to the moment when the interests, desires or sensibilities of any of the agents stopped being represented in the agreement. When the desire of amusement of the participants was ending, the coffee was getting cold, or when a new event appeared with a bigger capacity of attraction, the construction would evolve to find a new agreement.

We thought about the picnic as a transparent architectural construction. Transparency as explained by Kepes, the meeting of locations, of systems of reference, of diverse descriptions. Like the agents' living together with different desires and needs, with different ways of dealing and constructing their environment. A transparent object as the agreement that stabilizes and contributes consensus, without homogenizing.[7]

For a long time Architecture has worried about creating new realities, neglecting if the produced objects were filled with reality by themselves . Automatic fabric is not the vehicle of a new beginning, neither of an Utopian horizon. It is a system of contracts in which the actors who construct a context, from the user to the European postal system, from a gas deposit to the shared desire of lying down in a meadow of lawn, agree on temporary associations.
An architecture of relations that gives new meanings to the same terms as always. Constructing is not building but creating the conditions in order to make what already exists to emerge. Durability is not anymore about the permanence of the materials, instead it relates in what ways an association represents nature, desires and interests of different actors and how it will continue when facing new circumstances. Transparency is not the one of materials, but the symmetry in the information. A condition where all the parties involved in a process have voice, information and competence to understand it. It is also a n unsolved meeting between different positions. Or, with other words, a known controversy, not resolved.

SIDENOTES:
[1] Judd, Donald. In articles published between 1959 and 1970 in Art News, Arts Magazine y Art Internátional.
[2] Stiglitz, Joseph y Chang, Ha-Joon. On Liberty, the Right to Know and Public Discourse: The Role of Transparency in Public Life. [London 2001].
[3] Gursky, Andreas. Was in einem Thomson Gerät so alles drinsteckt. Publicity photograph for Thompson. 1981-86.
[4] Rowe, Colin, Slutzky, Robert. Transparencia: Literal y fenomenal. In Manierismo y arquitectura moderna y otros ensayos. [Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. 1978].
[5] Kepes, Gyorgy. The Nature And Art Of Motion [Nueva York: Braziller. 1965].
[6] Muniesa, Fabian. Sociólogo y profesor de la École des Mines de Paris.
[7] Latour, Bruno. La tecnología es la sociedad hecha para que dure. En M. Domènech y F. J. Tirado, Sociología simétrica. [Barcelona 1998]

Ojalá Awareness Club

2007-05-14T04:45:00.000-07:00

Ojalá Awareness Club

Ojalá Awareness Club overlaps a centre for the creation and exchange of political opinion, to a conventional intensively managed café use.

Waiters expose in their Velcro t-shirt public controversities (like climatic change, globalisation or same-sex-couples rights), visual projections on the walls bring into the space the leading edge of civil activism, toilettes have been painted with blackboard painting and provided with chalks to leave them available for fast wall-statements.

The very construction has included concerns taken from last years' public debate, already crystallised in the collective consensus. With a prioritary ecological aim: minimise the production of residuals in the transformation of the place.

Instead of demolishing all the pre-existences of the previous café, the whole work has been focused on transforming its atmospheric conditions with three actions:

- The exhaustive painting of the whole space from floor to ceiling with fluorescent green painting.

- The introduction of a colour changing lighting system, with cycles of colour scenes.

- The pouring of beach sand on the basement floor.

All this in three weeks, from decision to opening.

2007-05-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

Why you work the way you do, when everything seems to go the other way around? Response to Federico Soriano and Eduardo Arroyo's question.por Andrés JaquePublished in # 13, Fisuras.

Reconocimiento. Debe reconocer los créditos de la obra de la manera especificada por el autor o el licenciador.No comercial. No puede utilizar esta obra para fines comerciales.Compartir bajo la misma licencia. Si altera o transforma esta obra, o genera una obra derivada, sólo puede distribuir la obra generada bajo una licencia idéntica a ésta.
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It is true that the context of work is difficult in a society, the occidental one, that mitifies the progress but untrust innovation.The 86 % in the last four years has actually remained on the paper.In many cases it has not overcome the resistance of local arquitects who believe that even if we comply with our tasks, we make too weird things; from builders which, if they can, they offer to repeat the same of always, from mates who believe that creativity applies to space and shape, and the rest is decided by others, politicians who want to show our models but not to build them.But, although sometimes it can seem uncomfortable, in contrast with the modern arquitect, who thought to have privileged channels of relation with reality (science, reason); I think that arquitecture is a social construction between actors with different ideologies, mechanisms for description, performance and risk management procedures.And with opposed and inter-related interests.Arquitecture has changed from an activity based on the consummate facts into a consent activity.And the construction of objects of consent is a politician activity.I am aware of the fact that I work with politician objects that will be better not if they go deep into my interests but if they start being part of the life of multiple actors.If they get friendships and alliances, with no necessity of unifying aesthetic, moral or economic criteria.Parliament objects which represent the interests and perspectives of all the agents, and stabilize long lasting alliances between them.John Berger and Juan Muñoz tell how the communities from Kurda mountains, when they see that some wolf has attacked their farms, they organize themselves in groups and with torches they close and reduce the wolf´s enclosure, until they corner it.When this happen, instead of killing it, they hang a cowbell on its neck.The cowbell is an object of consent.It is the parliament in which the wolf, the community, the hens make a deal.All of them hand over a bit.All of them give up a little bit, but instead the agreement gets more lasting, because at heart it makes profit to all of them.I am aware that the material agreements are consolidated with, are not exclusively the projects of performance,and in any case it is slowlier than working with consummate or carried out facts.And I believe this convinction, besides the permanent exercise of the planned naivety, to be what keeps me working as I am doing.

teddy house

2007-04-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Daily Life Politics,
it´s always summer at the Teddy House
by Andrés Jaque

Teddy House in Coruxo (Vigo), uses previous experience on the summer use of a 1940s house to establish defining strategies in a new program of use. The project means a displacement from the modern vision of the house as an exemplary prototype to the house as a political construction.

Always summer at the Teddy House

In 1946, Demetrio Mendez, public notary of Villalba de Lugo, and his wife Celia Apenela bought Villa Quintanilla in Coruxo (Vigo) with a clear idea: spending summertime with all four children while facing the Cies Islands. A simple house with walls of ashlar made from Galician granite, sliding windows with green shutters and a flat tiles cover. As time passed by, the house has served as a resort to a family that found new ways, while growing numbers, to intensify the exploitation of the interior while systematizing a garden invasion; with the displacement of the furniture collection depending on the hour of the day searching for the right conditions to play board games, read the newspaper or having dinner.

Just recently, Ana, daughter of Demetrio and Celia, inherited the Coruxo house, and decided to move with his husband Enrique to live there all year. The commission we’ve received is to make all the changes needed to transform a summerhouse into an efficient house with a continuous use all year round .

There are 3 singular facts to consider in the designing process:

1. Community of Experts. The Mendez-Apenela after some time in the house, have become experts in its use and manipulation. They know how long it takes for a swimsuit to dry in the drying area, which rose will flower first or when will appear the fishmonger’s truck. They employ specific languages to name each part of house and garden, they use proper descriptions of nearby landscape as well as procedures to evaluate it.
In sum, they are able to mobilize the medium with own mechanisms and associate with it, thus creating own conditions. In other words, they have a privilege position from where other kinds of relationship with agents are possible, which could be called loosely the context.

2. Lab-house. Accumulated knowledge is the result of insistence in experimentation. In western cultures, summer is usually a pause when social conventions are relaxed. Coruxo has been a constant speculation ambit for the Mendez-Apenela family. Using different search and seeking methods, we’ve registered and studied a number of games where different ways of going around the garden with a tricycle, bicycles, roller blades; where was the table placed to have lunch or where was the best placement for a badminton match. In this case, agreements with environment are not the result of deduction, scientific and not even rational processes. Alike to control over Playstation2, it’s the accumulated possum of a play-oriented trial culture. A routine of critic, evaluation and alternative trials in a parliament of the daily life, are consolidated and celebrate in consensus, however, they’re always temporary. Like the Office-Kitchens of Silicon Valley or hacker communities, living in the Coruxo house implies a participation in a playful scepticism. Everything’s bound to found a better alternative, because it is fun to search for it.

3. Pet-house. In 1987, after 24 years of work, a project of personal guided trains for Paris, the Aramis system was finally considered a failure. In his famous book, half a detective story, half scientific investigation, Bruno Latour studied the history of the project, reread acts of reunions, studied budgets and all the controversies that aroused. Aramis failed finally because of lack of love in the project. Because politicians wanted it to be what it wasn’t, because engineers wanted to keep it a pure and complicated project, because nobody tried to pave the way for it. In sum, because all related parts worked to achieve a different goal, didn’t have any feelings regarding it and did not attend its needs.
Coruxo´s house is not the stand where life is given. There’s no divorce between activity and its spatial and physical organization. The housing is just another actor. The community of vacationers every year paint again all the damaged parts of the house, prune the trees, and decide along the neighbours regarding shared vegetation. The house, its transformation and maintenance, is taken care of and it’s also object of negotiations. It possesses acquired rights that both the Mendez-Apenela and the neighbours respect and protect.
The house has a citizenship card, imposes conditions, possibilities and limitations in the development of the situations. At the same time it is provided with meanings and, like a pet, her users have developed affective links with her. An example of that is the fact that before an imminent transformation, there are friends who photograph each other close to the house in a farewell ritual. This is the reason why I decided to call her TEDDY HOUSE, remembering the dolls that accompany the children while they sleep.

Relational Architecture

Coruxo's house is already a meeting of sensibilities and expertise, it is a laboratory with a permanent renovation agreement, and it is also an actor who consolidates lasting associations with the users, the climate and even the Town Hall of Vigo.
For a while I’ve been developing projects that explore the role that architectural objects can play in what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman have called the Social Construction of Reality.
In other words, I try to design architectural devices that take part in the consolidation of the knowledge that orientate behaviour in the daily life, loading it with democratic qualities. Objects that help to construct this plot of possibilities we call representative reality. In Coruxo's house I met the inverse situation. There’s an already consolidated reality, a culture that orientates different forms of representative ordinariness, but the object that might prolong its relevance was lacking in design.

My work consisted of providing the filters and enfolders which create the atmospheric control and the infrastructure equipment necessary in order to create, in both existing housing and new construction, the same uses that were given during the summer, in many cases in the garden, so they could relocate in spaces with modified conditions that turn out to be suitable during the rest of the year as well. Like the volume of showers that allow people to meet around the fir and to extend the conversations on the way returning from the beach, in the same way as a hose of the garden did for years.
Or the rooms secluded from the usual routes, similar to the former hammocks hung in the trees. Or the bubble that protects the place used for so long to set the table to eat, under the lime trees.
The paradigmatic housing of modernity was an exemplary prototype; a moral, aesthetic and economic machine that contained the keys of a normalized conduct/behaviour that was coming to construct the territory in a process of repetition and systematizing.

Above of circumstantial disputes, the discourses of part of the modernity promoted faith in the definitive efficiency of reason, science and technology like privileged channels of relationship between the individual and nature.6 The conflict among different perspectives actually did not exist, in fact it was a question of erroneous considerations that were solved studying in depth one of the channels and insisting on the unification of criteria.7 If we don’t come to an agreement, let's resort to science. It will tell us who is wrong.

However, I believe the increasing legal recognition of non human agents, the public dimension that’s taken over the channels of prestige (e.g. Science is not just Science anymore, it’s a Science that assumes interests and agendas of its sponsors) 8 and the consequent dissolution of the expert figure (of ubiquitous perspectives) as an interpretation and location of privileged action favoured over reality, 7 make of the current housing a political construction. It is not possible to think anymore that better solutions exist; we understand what an agent finds desirable worsens the life conditions of other agents. And that different experts work to defend different interests. Life conditions of the vegetable communities in the banks of river Miño would improve with an increase of the river’s flow, but as inhabitants of urban zones, we tend to lengthen our daily shower because it pleasures us and we don’t suffer directly the global consequences of this individual action. Architecture is the device that mediates and stabilizes relations between actors with both entwined and opposed interests. And I believe in a professional practice that doesn’t create metalanguages and doesn’t use fixed frames of reference to fit in the information of reality. Also that it does not consider the rest of agents to be informants, but as actants. Something that, inspired by Nicolas Bourriaud's famous writings, 10 I like to call Relational Architecture.

Daily life Politics

Carl Schmitt defines politics as the forum where enmities are negotiated and misunderstandings happen to turn, in a negotiated process of enrolment and development of alliances, into friendship and lasting contracts. An inconvenient but entertaining process. Which is always desirable, anyway, because the alternative is the imposition of one part’s criteria (leading towards a representation crisis) 12 or a violent clash. It is neither a moral unification process, nor aesthetics or ideological. Politics is the art of the possible, Bismark dixit, as well as the art of making friends, but friends with their own ideas.
Developed in parallel to the transformation of the pre-industrial state we have assisted to the extension of politics at the spheres where social reality is constructed. And if there’s a lot of modern architects who assumed a democratic agenda in their professional practice, let's remember for example Heinrich Tessenow´s call inviting the inhabitants of the Hellerau Gartenstadt to transform their houses making visible the organization of their daily life, 13 the architecture has been for a long time a debtor of political practices, common to the Prussian aristocracy that inaugurated the Deutsche Werkbund.

Walter Lippman points out how in western societies a crisis of representation, the process that moves further away parliaments and buildings from voters and users respectively, has never been solved injecting a more direct democracy. It is not a question of either voting more often, or asking the users to design. Instead, it’s about finding formulae that allow us to revise the role of the experts, 15 changing from protectors of science, reason and technology into agents of the represented experience of permanent decision making .16 Agents in a context where we all negotiate how to update the ordinariness.
"The Avant-garde movement means to force all the members in a society to decide on an offer that doesn’t come from her" 17. The house, in modernity discourses, was a machine for a society who believed in the redeeming efficiency of the overcoming processes. The second half of the 20th century has been a parade of new channels of natural associations: the channel of the vernacular, the one on memory, the one on languages, the one on representative democracy, the one on non-disciplinary practices, the one on negotiation between ubiquitous perspectives or the one on public processes. And the emergence of channels of double direction, as well, which have given voice to new citizens. Channels that, in a similar way to the protection of environment regulations or the natural observatories, have granted the status of actant to the animal communities, the terrestrial biomass or the ozone layer.

The TEDDY HOUSE is a political object. Political because it establishes a negotiation between actors with diverse ideologies, aesthetics and economies, providing all of them with the category of experts thus allowing them to accede to the spheres where decisions are made. Political because it segregates negotiations in friendship and dissent, from the processes of aesthetic, moral or ideological unification; and because it creates alliances without the need to unify or define privileged perspectives.
Moral, technological and aesthetic differences create enmities, but the management of the enmity is not moral, technological or aesthetic, just political.
The TEDDY HOUSE is a vehicle that crystallizes lasting associations.
And political as well, because, instead of an exemplary prototype, it’s the base of experimentation and a permanent negotiation. The arena where the great occupation of the contemporary citizen takes place. What Sloterdijk, after Heidegger, describes as the fundamental activity of men, it’s what puts us in the world: to experiment with ourselves and give this routine a public dimension.18. A routine that connects us with reality or, said otherwise, what makes us real.
Andrés Jaque es arquitecto y profesor de Proyectos Arquitectónicos en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Ha sido investigador residente de la Alfred Toepfer Stiftung en Hamburgo y desde octubre de 2000 dirige en Madrid la oficina de arquitectura Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. Su obra Casa Sacerdotal Diocesana de Plasencia forma parte de la selección de la VIII Bienal Española de Arquitectura.

SIDENOTES:

1. Himanen, Pekka. The hacker ethic. (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino. 2001).

2. Latour, Bruno. Aramis or the love of technology. (Cambridge MA y Londres R.U.: Harvard University Press. 1996).

3. Around this, Teddy House´s experience is far from the most famous study case of the second half of the 20th century in architectural culture. A case study that´s already part of architectural orthodoxy: an historical analysis of Manhattan and the development of a culture Rem Koolhas named manhattanism. Where Koolhas detects a divorce between building structures and the activity regimes that regulate use guidelines and update procedures in the urban island of Manhattan. It is important to point out what sociologists linked to what has been called Symmetrical Sociology have explained so often, that approximations like Rem Koolhas´s are in debt with the model of analysis inherited from the Marxist thinking; based on the autonomy of the physical infrastructures regarding the cultural superstructures. However, it is a model of analysis that has always eluded a detailed description of the chain of events that could explain the anatomy of the dominance processes. Opposed to these approximations and before the need to find formulae capable of operating in the crisis zones of the Marxist paradigm, the symmetrical sociology has chosen to focus the attention on an extension of the concept of social actor to non human agents and to the characterization of the agreements consolidated between all of them. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (Nueva York: Oxford University Press. 1978).

4. Berger, Peter L. y Luckmann, Thomas. The social construction of Reality. (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores. 1968).

5. The use in this text of the term “modernity” corresponds to that of the Frankfurt School, which is not entirely similar to the usual in architecture.

6. On this regard, I´ve followed Habermas, Jürgen en Technik und Wissenchaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main. 1968) and Guiddens, Anthony Consecuencias de la modernidad (Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1993).

7. On this theme: Latour, Bruno War of the worlds: what about peace? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press 2002).

8. You only have to think about the importance of specific associations or lobbies with an ethical project on defining agendas of scientific investigation. As an example of the first case let's think about the importance that associations of groups with high risk of HIV contagion, haemophilic and homosexual, had in the mobilization of public funds for the research of vaccines and palliative treatments. On the second case, let's remember the importance that of numerous group of religious groups opposed to research using mother cells in the exclusion of certain scientific programs.

9. In regards to this, without going further, there´s a clear example in recent controversy around the dimensions of social housing in Spain. Far from becoming an debate inside just the architectural profession, the public debate has surpassed the circle of official experts to become a multivoiced debate, where everyone involved –users, politicians, promoters and architects- has a perspective of analysis and an evaluation of their own. They´re all experts with an unique perspective and interrelated interests, yet sometimes, opposed too.

10. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics (Dijon FR:les Presses du Reel. 1998)

11. Schmitt, Carl. "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political") (Madrid: Alianza Editorial) .

12. Susan sontag has denounced how the kitsch, the tacky, the feminine and the effeminate have been systematically excluded from aesthetic constructions of the highbrow culture. Talking about technology, we could say the very same about the unoptimized or the opportunist solutions. And, talking about moral, the trompe l'œil, the metaphorical figure or the ornament. About this, it´s important to point out the increasing interest, inaugurated with Venturi and Scott-Brown, among architects to find practices that promote representation in their products. Sontag, Susan. Against interpretation and other essays. (Nueva York: Picador. 1967).

13. Tessenow, Heinrich. Heinrich-Tessenow-Archiv. Kunstbibliothek, Berlin.

14. Wellmer, Albrecht. Art and industrial production. (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. 1991)

15. Lippman, Walter. The phantom public. (Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace and Company)

16. On the failure of systems of experts associated to Ilustration it´s interesting to read: Chazanovskij, Karcev. Warum irrten die Experten? (Berlín: Verlag Technik GMBH. 1980)

17. Sloterdijk, Peter. Esferas I. Burbujas. Microesferología. (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela. 2003).

18. Sloterdijk, Peter y Oliveira, Carlos. Experimentos con uno mismo. (Valencia: Pre-Textos. 2003).

2007-04-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

mousse-city
Stavanger[Norway] 2nd price open competition
by Andrés Jaque

MOUSSE CITY COMES TO GIVE AN ANSWER TO THE LACK OF ADAPTABILITY IN RESIDENTIAL FABRICS

MOUSSE CITY MAKES USE OF THE LEADING EDGE IN MARKET KNOWLEDGE, ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY AND INTERACTION STRATEGIES TO REDIFINE THE LIVING BASE OF EUROPEAN UNION UNAFECTED CITIZENSHIP

A confrontation: social,
A description: functional,
A statement: political.

translations [confrontation] 1
Lets think of houses as spatial translation of both intimate social bonds and personal-scale investment strategy. As most of occidental urban fabrics, Stavanger’s has proved to fail in synchronising the renovation of personal ties and the adaptation of spatial support and property investment management. Bubble-atoms can be physically connected, disconnected and reconnected in different ways, and economically managed to create an on-demand spatial translation of users life. Property is related to spatial units like in timeshare condominiums schemes. Rights are not directly linked to specific bubbles. A community of renters occupy the empty units and are paid to move from one location to others to maintain the transformability of the system.
Mousse-city performs simultaneously as a value-market and a compensating-chamber, providing a legal and economical base for an efficient, secure and rapid adaptation of property management and spatial configuration to the changing states of need, related to evolution of social ties.

program belt [description] 2
Mousse-city system of connected green spaces works as a belt of disposed corridors. Activity-producing-fabrics touching program-attracting-bands, ephemerally invaded with automatic states of use.
Mousse atomises dwelling tissue into bubble-units providing daily live in a net of connected green belts.

metropolitan awareness [statement] 3

Awareness makes an issue of contemporary metropolis.
Legibility of urban processes makes possible the equalitarian social integration of individuals. Rather than a modernistic ideological unification machine, mousse-city has been thought as a voice-giving-device.

Self-explaining environment. News from animal and vegetal communities are continuously announced in screens displayed in access spaces. Translating the language of these non-human new citizens, to human languages.

Democratic forum, opportunities maker. Techno-notes-board for individuals to get together associating in daily shared micro-projects, like playing tennis or teaching each other new recipes.

Ecological indicator. Lets make it possible for everyone to evaluate the ecological performance of each construction element in mousse-city. Including within each of them a sign with its geographical origin, its embodied energy, the energy invested in transportation and its reciclability.

Techno-Geisha

2007-04-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

Techno-Geisha
transformable clothing for the
ultimate urban entertainmer

by Andrés Jaque

www.andresjaque.net

With the special help of the conceptual artist Alicia Ríos

[collaborators]
Tania Álvarez
Carmen Ovejero
María-Solange Faría
Herminia Vegas

[model]
Sybille Streck

[photograph]
Miguel de Guzmán

[first shown in Doméstico Gallery 2003]
[tested in Madrid, September-November 2003]

Device for the insertion of individual contribution in a metropolitan environment.

Automatic fabric actually has to do with the making of a character. A character hyper-equipped to create associations among different people. To make different people sharing time together without leaving their personal opinions or behaviours.

Automatic fabric is the making of a techno-geisha, a techno-host that changes her clothes to make it possible for people to feel at home in the contemporary metropolis.

And it is also an architectural manifesto, for we believe that is exactly what architecture is about. Create mediations in-between people making it possible for them to create comfortable associations on the base of diversity.

TUPPER HOMES

2007-04-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

Tupper Home
by Andrés Jaque

Andrés Jaque Arquitectos
Duque Fernán Núñez, 2
28012 Madrid
tel. +34 91 4201008
oficina@andresjaque.com
www.andresjaque.net

Location: Madrid
January-July 2006

Design Team:
Teresa del Pino
Helena Bartosova
Sarah Caperos
Rebecca Frisoli
Iris Hutinger
Pedro Pinto-Correia
Jorge Ruano,
Architects

Construction Manager:
Andrés Jaque
Pedro Pinto-Correia,
Architects

Research:
Pablo Hurlé,
Sociologist, Journalist

Marketing:
Laura Arenas,
Product Design Consultant

Photographs:
Miguel de Guzmán
www.migueldeguzman.com

Structural Engineer:
Belén Orta,
Architect

Construction:
GESCÓN S.L.

Tupper Home Shop

The Tupper Home is the first product of the Tupper Home Shop, the catalogue of architectural products commercialised by the Andrés Jaque Arquitectos office, of which the first prototype has just been constructed in the centre of Madrid. It is raised as an alternative to the strategic official urbanism, it’s based on the experiences of pyramidal marketing -Tupperware, Avon, Herbalife, Termomix - that became popular after WWII and that have demonstrated their efficiency as a network of communication, let's call it pop, with innovative guidelines of conduct.

The Tupper Home gives an architectural and financial response to three public worries that prove the crisis of the development model of residential fabrics of the Spain of the age of the Euro and of which the design in detail of the housings is a point of obliged step.

Crisis #1
More technology (cheap), less land (expensive)

Without considering the price of building land; the costs of project, license, work, funding, management and marketing of housings, have barely had relative movements of importance in the last years, whereas the clear benefits derived directly from the tasks of promotion have multiplied by seven, reaching last year almost a third of total costs of the market price of new or rehabilitated houses: a 26,9 %.

The increase of the price of land, has had a direct effect in the rise of the final price of housing and the benefits derived from its promotion; but it has helped neither to increase the quality of construction, nor to foment substantial innovations in the protocols of design. Price of the soil, specialization in design and technological range have crystallized as independent variables not interrelated in the decision taking on strategies of development of residential fabrics.

Nevertheless, we have been witnesses of the possibilities derived from experiences of design who bet for compensating the reduction of one variable with the increase of another one. The size of the rooms in most recent hotel chains placed in urban zones – such as NH -, has diminished, compensating with an increase of the technological range the possible diminish of comfort conditions. For example increasing the level of acoustic isolation.

Crisis #2
Beneath the mortgage, the beach!

Right now, the average level of indebtedness of house buyers in Spain is 44,2 %. We have seen in the recent events in the airport of Barcelona, El Prat that the paradigmatic argument of the trade union movements - ' we have children to feed! '-, has been replaced with ' we have mortgages to pay! '. In the Europe we have to live in, the mortgages of up to fifty years constitute the primary cause of labour immobility and, ahead of other personal criteria, define the number of hours people dedicate to work.

The liberation of land and the subsequent decrease in its price, would have an effect in the final price of housing - the cost of the land is the main component-. But the price of the housing depends on the expectations of sale and, and as recent experience has demonstrated, a decrease in the price of the land does not necessarily imply a reduction in the price but, in most times, an increase of the profit margin and the volume of business of real state agents.

Crisis #3
More Professional Qualification, representation in the public sphere

Since construction is one of the engines of the Spanish economy, the level of industrialization it reaches is a key factor in the development of the educational profile of society and other related aspects - mobility in employment, update capacity of knowledge and skills, access to information and participation in public life -. 72 % of the works involved in a construction process do not require specialized manpower. The spectacular increase in low specialization construction activity has helped to mobilize a social group with scanty preparation, and without possibilities of finding formative opportunities in their professional context. The reduced capacity to access information, take part in the public sphere and definitively to emerge as groups represented by the public institutions is already an important source of inequality and conflict in many areas of the European Union.

The Tupper Home system proposes three strategic lines of design as an architectural response to these concerns:

1.- Less space, more equipped: constant advantages

The Tupper Home system makes use of specialized technological solutions and standardized processes. This has as a direct effect on space usage, making possible to have the same benefits and services with a reduction of 55 % of the floor area of the house. In these moments it is costlier to invest in size than technology. The superior technological performance leads to a 52% reduction in the overall price of the house.

2.- Deomstrative marketing, the user sells

It is time to test alternatives to politics of promotion of social housing. The Tupper Home contains its own spreading mechanism, a demonstrative system were the own users promote the advantages of the system to friends, lovers or even complete unknowns, via a mouth to mouth model of promotion - that has proven its efficiency in generating confidence in products aimed at the construction of domestic reality-. Existing users enrol their friends in the city transformation process and turn into their tutors, providing them the necessary knowledge to take part in a process of design that involves selecting components from the catalogue of the Tupper Shop.

3.- Tupper Home Community

As an indirect effect, the Tupper Home System seeks to contribute to the formation of a community of users who, because their lives are not governed by the need to pay off their home, enjoy greater social freedom and independence. On another front, the higher qualifications required of manufacturers and assemblers helps to increase their capacity to participate in the construction of the public sphere. All this factors strengthen the public awareness of citizens who are able to act as clients; equipped with leisure time and access to information they now contribute to the creation of spaces for social action. Shouldn’t this goal be included in the public agendas of promotion of housing in democratic societies?.

First prototype

Construction of the first prototype – a unique, plastic apartment of 30m2 – was finished last July. The clients are a middle-aged couple who wished to move outside Madrid, leaving their two adolescent sons to live independently in the city centre.
The house has two storeys. The lower level contains a kitchen, bathroom and cupboards plus a multi-purpose space that stretches the entire four-metre height of the house. Upstairs, in compartments made of PLEXI cellular acrylic glass with round windows, are the study and two bedrooms. Access to this half-floor is via a sliding stepladder, like the ones used in old libraries. The design criterion is clear: what was there was left as it was and the new was overlapped. All the services, the electricity in PVC tubing and the new steel elements are exposed and painted in bright colours. Reflecting on the building process and the result, the users and designers of this project are reminded of how Spanish mothers prepare Tupperware boxes with home-made food for their independent children, because it seems this house has been built with the same affection.