Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
I
Though comprehensible, Venturi’s criticism of some of the clichés of modern architecture in Complexity and Contradiction are in fact simply a paradigm shift, though restricted to the autonomous world of formal relations. Of the book’s more than 130 mentions of the words contradiction or contradictory, not once is the focus explicitly political, social or economic. Any reference to contradiction is somehow diverted to the field of form: of scale, of relations between interior and exterior, between parts and whole, etc. Any possibility of questioning or political interpretation is thereby condemned or reduced to an exegesis of what remains, quietly implied, beneath the surface of this text.
However, without wishing to overlook the potential of form, there are essential issues that lie beyond its control. Contradictions, whether political, social or economic, should act as triggers that activate architecture, however alien or comfortable it may seem, developing in an autonomous world, far from political decision-making, where tensions and dissent are often reduced to the strictly rhetorical, to exercises of style in which the economy is merely the foundation of pre-established, abstract and hygienic margins of action within which to operate.
II
Originally economy was the term used to denote the administration of household resources, the management of the house. The economy belonged, then—though not exclusively—to the manageable scale of the household, to the limits of the known. However, domesticity, as we have recently seen, also has an immediate and fragile relation with the large scale of the macro economy, around which politics and power exercise their liberal safeguard. Evictions, the abandonment of housing blocks and entire neighbourhoods standing empty with their thousands of interiors awaiting a use connect small worlds with the global machinery over which citizens are now demanding control, a reformulation of the public sphere and, with it, of the boundary between individual and collective.
III
We devote this issue of Quaderns to domesticity. But we would be deceiving ourselves if by domestic we merely understood notions such as house, home, shelter or intimacy. The domestic combines politics with form and connects different scales, extending its domain from the macro economy to the most basic form of architecture in terms of use: the room, to which part of this issue is devoted. The house, seen as a collection of rooms, predetermines, according to the way they are related or their different sizes, how it will be occupied and what type of relations will be established in it over time. It is in this sense that the conception of domestic form is comparable to politics: to the extent that it can perpetuate clichés and, over time, condition the transformation of the domestic realm.
It is in this ambivalence of scales that we see how the definition of domesticity draws the boundary that exists between individual and public, between urban world and the house, concepts defined by blurred lines that are constantly moving.
Francesc Magrinyà reminds us in one of the articles that opens this issue that philosopher Ju?rgen Habermas described the origin of the public sphere under the auspices of the emerging bourgeoisie and, with it, the transformation of the public space that supported it;1 similarly, we might say that this process has led to a growing confusion between the public and the private sphere, accompanied by a gradual disconnection between individual and collective, as Sennett writes in his well-known The Fall of Public Man.2
But seeing how, in the case of evictions, it is in the street—that is, in public space—that part of society makes the private world visible with its presence,3 we may be tempted to think of the perverse ideological logic of slogans which, strengthening these limits, claim to make our home an independent republic.
Perhaps, ultimately, domesticity is simply an excuse to explore, by means of all of these contradictions, how architecture has to reflect in order to produce renewed ideas that allow us to advance towards the reconquest of the public sphere.
1. Habermas, Ju?rgen. Strukturwandel der Öffenlichkeit, Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962.
2. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man, Knopf, New York, 1977.
3. Our thanks for this suggestion to Xavier Monteys.
