Living today

If someone were to ask me to speak freely on the issue of housing today, with a particular emphasis on collective housing, I would have to touch, however briefly, at least on the following points, which I leave as a score that will perhaps generate discussion:

1. The conceptual crisis of collective housing (at all levels assisted, community-based housing, conditioned by the high level of urbanization, crisis of the modernist model, failure of socializing-collectivist thinking, etc...); the issue being very little critically discussed.

2. The crisis of gated communities (living protected by walls, isolating a socially "superior" community from the rest of the city). By extension, the crisis of wealthy suburban individual housing in the US (resulting in: the emergence of The New Urbanism, any new form of settlement - satellite neighborhood - fractally repeats the complexity of the whole, i.e. has all urban forms in the small).

3. The new post-Facebook intimacy; the dedramatization of the idea of comfort, the refusal of typification through the success of DIY (it has reached us: do it yourself, DIY; v. Ikea and other home improvement chains).

4. "Democratic" architecture, the "socialism of the production of private space": the home is not the privileged domain of the architect, who is no more a specialist in housing than the average client (see Christopher Alexander and his A Pattern Language).

Information (its production and consumption) becomes a component of dwelling and even an emblem of social status: the house/the screen.

5. At the bosom of "Mother Geea": legislated energy recovery and self-sustainability in the West transforms the house into a computerized energy saving and producing machine (the buried house, the heat pump, material efficiency, smart facades, solar/wind, household waste, etc...).

After that I would also give examples of best practices in contemporary residential architectures and their environment:

(a) Rural Studio, Herzog/De Meuron, Mahti Senaksenaho, Habitat and Art Foundation in Romania (i.e. sculptor Alexandru Nancu, Augustin Ioan and friends).

b) minimalism, poverism, "as found" materials (not necessarily natural, but recyclable), "humble": revitalization of natural materials, a new return - culturally - to "nature": adobe, wood, cane, bamboo, but also massive natural stone.

c) the DIY-house (Herczeg House, Timișoara); the application of philosophical principles to architecture: the fold/fold (MVRDV, Mecanoo, Rem Koolhas); the Mobius house and the anti-Oedipian house: a new stakes of the public-private relationship in the Foucaultian sense of Mobius's strip (through a new dosage of the theme of transparency, different relations with the outside, dissipation of the dichotomy between public and private and/or day/night activities); rediscovery of intermediate spaces (courtyards, porches, cursives).

To conclude such a discourse, I would make the following bitter observation.

In our country everything is to be done and all the mistakes are repeated: gated communities are appearing, social housing is not being discussed, those in the socio-human sciences are not terribly interested in investigating collective housing after 50-60 years of application, individual housing is not experimental in the sense of new housing models, but only - rarely - in the sense of the expression, and the state, through ANL, although it should no longer be in this market, is building the same blocks, only much worse...