La disoluciĂłn de la estancia
Transformaciones domésticas 1930-1960 by José Morales
selected by Nuria Solsona
Domestic domain as something close, personalised and special is nothing new. However, it was a novelty between the nineteen-thirties and sixties. It was brought to light by the concerns of some architects who were worried by social facts that they felt were related to a need for change in ways of inhabiting.
 This book encompasses several examples of the first dwellings that have one thing in common: their architects strove to take the concept of the room as an intimate and comfortable space a step further. These are rooms whose design transformed domestic space, changing the habits of the dweller in respect to space and leisure time. Stretching from the vanguard to the late nineteen-sixties, the examples given detail how domestic transformation has contributed to the approach of architectural space to its use, which is inseparable from the personal.
Le Corbusier started by changing the inhabitant’s point of view, reconsidering proportions, heights, views; Sert domesticated leisure culture and dissolved the room by means of external light; Charles and Ray Eames, without a doubt, created the maximum exponents of a happy celebration of daily life… Many more examples provide an overview of the history of architectural comfort and the inseparable relationship between the psychological and the spatial.
Private and intimate needs are just as much behind the idea of inhabiting as is collective desire. That is why “rooms” always look beyond the window, relieve as much as protect bodies and are dissolved into the exterior landscape of intimate dreams.
This publication won an FAD Architecture prize (2006) in the category of “Thought and Critics”.
                  “The Interventionists. Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life”. Editors Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette. Catalogue from the exhibition “The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere” organized by MASS MoCA, from May 2004 until March 2005.Â
selected by Mireia Saladrigues
This book is not a traditional exhibition catalogue. It works—as its subtitle says—as a manual with tactics for civil disobedience, building low-cost shelters for life in the streets, glimpsing at the behind-the-scenes world of business, performing in front of surveillance cameras, GMO food-testing units, managing free speech and dissidence and all other kinds of tools for developing your own politics. The projects are ordered into four different chapters: Nomads, Reclaim the Streets, Ready to Wear and The Experimental University, making them easy to access. These practitioners, who work more comfortably within a community of activists than in a gallery, might not bring about a social revolution in the age of global capitalism, but they will most likely inspire acts of resistance within our everyday lives.
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