Fun is in da House - Housing for People
Fun is in da House - Housing for People
by Zsófia Glatz and Bence Komlósi
HOW can we live the way we want to live? HOW can we live with fun? HOW can we make fun accessible for everyone? HOW can we add “lust” to housing developments?
PARTICIPATORY design, BOTTOM-UP movement, DO-IT-YOURSELF, CO-HOUSING development, FLEXIBLE - open structure, SELF-MANAGEMENT, DEMOCRATIC structure are just a few key phenomena that help us to do the things we want to do in terms of living and housing.
Community event in the Kraftwerk1 - Hardturm organized by the residents
photo source: http://kraftwerk1.ch/leben/impressionen.html accessed 1st of May, 2013
The ARCHITECTS’ task is to build the THEATER but the RESIDENTS should play their own PLAYS. We, the residents should build our own scene to play a drama, a love story or a comedy - “Lustspiel”! Yona FRIEDMAN was searching the free structure - the theater - throughout his whole life. He said: “As a young architect, I began to discover the way to create a house imagined by its inhabitant, even if its form or its plan was different from the one imagined by others. How could we adapt the form an inhabitant think of one day to another form he would prefer later, another day? I thus began to search for a “technique.”1
For the French architects - LACATON & VASSAL - the free structure is an interpretation of FREEDOM. In their works they try to define only the very needed MINIMUM and leave the WINDUP for the residents. They say that “ The structure should be free, very roomy, in order to create a new rapport with the climate and the ambience, a new rapport with activity and so as to produce the conditions for mobility and enjoyment.”2
image source: http://openarchitectures.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/screen-shot-2011-12-04-at-6-24-44-pm.png accessed 5th of October, 2014
image source: http://www.spatialagency.net/database/lacaton.vassal accessed 5th of October, 2014
1 Yona Friedman, Pro Domo (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 9.
2 Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, “Structural freedom, a precondition for the miracle,” 2G N.60, 2012, 162.
