The Advantages of Living on a Loop (2nd part)

CONVERSATION BETWEEN POWERHOUSE COMPANY, EKHI LOPETEGI AND ARQUITECTURA-G

(See first part)

Published at Apartamento Magazine #3

http://www.apartamentomagazine.com/

EKHI LOPETEGI

I wouldn’t like to reduce the complexities of the Spiral House to its most obvious and eye catching feature, but the encoun­ter between the extension and the farmhouse at the roof level deserves some remarks. As Charles (POWERHOUSE) wrote, the extension’s appearance is ‘brutal’ and in my opinion the more brutal it appears the more interesting it gets. Instead of a Siamese body, I would say it’s more like a prosthesis, for every prosthesis entails a formal and functional aggression and strongly makes reference to the difference between the bodies connected. The visual relationship between the two bodies as volumes is not transitional or continuous, even though there is a functional transition and continuity in pragmatic terms that makes the two bodies work efficiently. Above all, the strange­ness of the new body is highlighted and so it is the violence the prosthesis does to the old ‘maison’.

Two subjects come to mind at this point. In terms of mem­ory, by explicitly showing the present burst into the past, the Spiral House implies a discontinuous or non-linear historical approach. And this is achieved not by some fancy futuristic trick (that would probably entail a rather linear approach), but by the sober but radical presence of the new body. What we see is not the 19th-century lifestyle friendly meet the 21st-century forms of life. What we see is two historical situations collide.

So, the way I see it, the historical encounter is understood as a confrontation. The whole historical timeline is broken and the gap in between is uncovered violently.

Related to this temporal feature, in terms of space, the con­frontation is even more dramatic. The whole idealistic idea of the ‘maison’ as a whole, complete and finished object is destroyed. The visual image of this farmhouse, this childish ‘triangle + cube’ image of a house, is perverted by a simple gesture of coupling two bodies in a visually arbitrary point. In my opinion there’s an underlying principle concerning any architectural interventions that could be expressed as follows: any object or volume can be cut off in any of its points. Which doesn’t mean the cut off is arbitrary, for the functional coher­ence and efficiency will always be a measure and a value. But it clearly shows the house is partially taken in consideration, not as a whole ideal unit.

Gordon Matta Clark showed us this in other terms by cutting off building size volumes as if they were hand size sculptures, and this way he broke the idea of how those objects should look in our mind’s eye, opening a new field for volumetric experi­mentation. As far as the Spiral House is a dwelling unit and not a plain body, we should maybe quote Deleuze and Guattari’s first principle for a definition of a rhizome, which encloses this pragmatic feature:

“1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be… semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. “

Obviously, architecture can also be understood as a bunch of ‘modes of coding’ space, with their particular set of rules and syntax. The Spiral House connects two heterogeneous ar­chitectural regimes (the 19th century farm house and its ex­tension); the connection is understood as fragmentary (both units connect in a partial and arbitrary point, the roof level), and not as the complete harmonisation of different dwelling units or codes; therefore, the Spiral House provokes the rup­ture of the farm house coherence in favour of a new functional and spacial relationship that opens the house to knew dwelling possibilities.

 

ARQUITECTURA-G

We find interesting to invert the proportion 80% public / 20% private, because it complements the house in a yin-yang-like way, with the background idea of making the house more open. Thinking about the Spiral House as an opening to itself though, it looks even more interesting to us; to understand the farm like a closed and finished being that generates something open to new possibilities when breaking (like Ekhi pointed mentioning Matta-Clark). “Two bodies kept irreversibly captive of the time loop and forced to explore together the possibilities of this new situation”, but Matta-Clark showed us the entrails and then his action was over. His aim wasn’t to create a place to live in, although it could be a space to live.

The farm is broken and it loses its closed unity, its iconic identity fades out, it’s opened up. Then, in contraposition pro­gram is added and related with the existing one and what we get is the Spiral House. Is this opening something for closing it back? Could a house be an open box, or is the program too rigid (due to its finite possibilities) and therefore requires us to a closed outcome?

We prefer the definition of “two Siamese bodies” for the whole rather than the Ballardian prosthesis one for the new piece. Prostheses are artifices subordinated to a body that brings them life, and in this case the dialogue is from equal to equal. One could usually live without prosthesis, but in this case, and for this program, they are two bodies that die when separated.

It’s evident but important to see that we have two bodies, the 19th-century one and the 21st-century one. It is this last one, the spiral, which achieves that, although they are two bod­ies that work continuously as a single one. The new body is a programmatic gradient that gives continuity to the two exist­ing trays that had premeditated and polarized functions. Thus, the Spiral House considers a contemporary way of living more than giving a formal answer to what a XXI century house should be. It looks for a new way of dwelling.