house: the one-off place in which one lives, full of your stuff, your status or lack of it, your address; as small as a room, as large as a palace. houses: collectively make a neighbourhood where standards are set and maintained through variable social pressure, from the most forgiving to the most restrictive. One’s autonomy bends a bit. housing: where the typology of house is subsumed in an arithmetic calculation of site, cost, zoning, market, product and precise demography. One’s security is dependent on all these factors. There is an axis, or a gradient, of freedom and self-actualisation here which is deeply embedded in history and place. The discussion that applies to Calgary or Houston, is not the discussion one has in Marseilles or Kharkiv. Nor is it the one taking place in Lagos or the abandoned new cities in China. What everyone across the world has, or wants to have, is secure tenure: their own place, no matter how it is found, or built, or paid for. This is the starting point. Beyond this it is all theory.
The photo-essay on the front and back covers of this issue of On Site review speaks to the longevity of housing, and the anonymity of any one unit in a housing project. It started with a postcard which has been on my wall for years, of L S Lowry’s small 1962 drawing of two housing terraces on a hill in Abertillery, Wales: smooth hills, the isolated crenellation of roofs and flat fronts. I looked up Abertillery to see if this line of houses still existed. It does, joined by other lines of houses, which turn out to be streets built in fields as if they were in a town. These are typical nineteenth century Welsh mining towns, either coal or tin — company towns. The joined-up repetition of a basic house unit is a synecdoche for the miners and their families. All different, but also all the same to the company. A street view of one of the Abertillery roads shows how literally it terraces the hillside. There are shops, there is a bus stop, no doubt a pub; each street a small community. Lisa Rapoport concludes her essay on page 8 with this: ‘You buy a house, you make a home.’ We could also say, you build a house, someone else makes a home out of it, followed by someone else making a different home, and on and on. If we were designing with this long horizon in mind, our houses would be much simpler, more reductive, more open to change. At the same time if we are looking for aesthetic solutions with the political clarity modernity demands, we are in danger of overlooking the richness of messy everything, everywhere, all at once-ness that finds houses and housing everywhere, anywhere. In an unregulated space there is opportunity for many, many ways of living: new social relationships, new material and architectural formations.
o
STEPHANIE WHITE , editor of On Site review , practiced architecture, studied the influence of literary theory on architecture, taught many, many architectural design studios, and did a PhD in urban geography. Quelle vie .
19
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator