Domestic Dawns

This itinerary presents a series of concepts and examples of collective housing that constitute the operative theoretical framework of residential architecture today. The aim is to locate and define those terms that are beginning to constitute the characteristic vocabulary of collective housing design at the turn of the century.The selection is based on the exhibition that the ICO (Official Credit Institute) Foundation and the Directorate General for the Urban Agenda and Architecture of MITMA (Spain's Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda) presented at the ICO Museum with the exhibition Amaneceres domésticos (Domestic Sunrises): Collective housing issues in 21st century Europe, which could be visited from 5 October 2022 to 15 January 2023. The Master of Architecture in Collective Housing "MCH" and theCollective Housing Research Group"GIVCO" of the Polytechnic University of Madrid are the intellectual support of these collective works. The videos were made by Tatiana Poggi and Joaquín García Vicente.Climate awareness

Although sometimes resorting to platitudes, awareness of climate and planet is not related to a passing architecture or a formal fashion, but to a crucial issue in the thinking of our time: how we relate to the natural environment, what is the limit of technology and how that same technology can help us to find a balance between construction and conservation.Housing architecture, freed from pure speculation, can be effectively linked to parameters of proximity and low technology without abandoning the intellectual centres of contemporary architecture. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental reflections of committed architecture. Local is nothing but a reflection on the capacities to negotiate with the environment, a possibility that depends on how climate and minimum resource consumption are conceptualised. This agreement must be reached through a reflection that involves a reformulation of concepts related to use, efficiency and also the universal paradigm of infinite comfort and welfare bargaining. Building of 159 social housing units in CarabanchelThis negotiation also entails a reflection on the circularity of the economy and on the exhaustion of the principle of constant development in the face of a slow and temperate economy. In this scenario, projects such as Life Reusing Posidonia propose an act of gratitude to the environment and also of attention to the cultural context as a regulator of architectural activities; although it is, fundamentally, an act of safeguarding our own species.Active rechargingNordic and Central European countries estimate that the activity associated with the recycling of architecture, whether existing or obsolete, is as high as 50 %; something that implies a radical change in building, structural, energy, programmatic and regulatory systems. The number of non-residential buildings that have been stripped of their original function in developed societies as a whole is becoming increasingly significant, and some of these buildings have been offered to support new residential structures. Industrial architecture is a clear example of how a pre-existence can be re-signified by incorporating the residential project into a previous structure Fabra & Coats. These reloading exercises do not consist solely of adhesion or reuse but, starting from an obsolete construction, their proposals investigate the mechanisms with which to update the image and use. It is fundamentally based on a capacity to spread optimism in the face of the material ageing of things; to some extent everything can be reborn. After all, the demands of architecture in terms of sustainability are related to its longevity and its adaptive capacity over its lifetime Two houses in Oropesa.Domestic careMore and more intensively, our residential buildings are taking on very different situations, their uses are multiplying and the old paradigms in the field of collective housing are dissolving. The structure of the most advanced households also shows an eloquent level of production. It is not only a question of incorporating new work trends, such as remote working, but also that these new projects provide spaces in which to carry out other activities beyond the commercial ground floor of buildings. Some of these activities are related to care, whether it is the care of the elderly in a care facility or childcare, which allows parents to fulfil their obligations outside the family environment Torre Júlia.The optimisation of physical and mental well-being with the aim of increasing life expectancy, both quantitatively and qualitatively, implies the incorporation of new buildings that contain not only places to stay but also places of stimulation. These spaces have nothing to do with the social lounges of nursing homes separated from the rooms, as they understand the building as a whole as a city connected to the outside that can be walked through actively and freely. An opportunity is opening up before us that goes beyond mere opportunistic business, that of extending this type of initiative, in terms of organisation, to all regular residential buildings. To understand the grouping in this way is to understand the instability of existence, but it is also a commitment to an architecture of the collective grouping capable of physically welcoming and embodying these changes which, in turn, turn it into an organism in permanent mutation 40 supervised flats for the elderly in La Cala de Benidorm area. It is not a question of replacing some conditions with others, but of refocusing on the concept of the collective and broadening it in terms of housing, making room for different emerging social and economic situations. As relation to the family, it is possible to think of the individual who chooses how his private life and his relations with the collective reality should be.New managementThe Indivisible ownership, outright purchase or orthodox renting are in question in an economy of frightening instability that has generated some innovations in promotion mechanisms, whether public or private. The rise of new management systems in production and use has also altered the conditions of the residential project and, therefore, its final result. In the same way, the emergence of participatory design has produced a slight transformation in the working systems of architectural studios, which must change in order to face an increasingly transversal project system {La Borda housing Cooperative||0000005206}.The fast and unstoppable changes taking place in our societies mean that the adaptation of collective housing buildings to new living situations must not only be accepted, but also driven by the project. It is not a matter of implementing various regulated possibilities that satisfy typical families, fixing the different sizes of adaptation, but rather of understanding the new relationships that occur within the home for various cohabitation groups and expanding them to the building and the city {Equipamientos Londres-Villarroel||0000001655}. The historical basis for thinking about the use of collective housing has been based on the nuclear family. Only the great revolutionary utopias and situations that can be assimilated to heterotopias (such as prisons or barracks) have shown us other ways of reflecting on shared domesticity. Other domesticities are possible besides hospitals or convents.Urban contextsAmong the tools at our disposal to reflect on the urban and urbanity are the aspects related to the continuity of the fabric and the material suitability within the physical context, but also the latter can be expanded to the cultural context, which places the housing project within the reflections of a social nature that define a given era. In the same way, infrastructures and the fabric of services complement housing projects, which can no longer be conceived independently of their immediate context; they must be considered from the point of view of the set of structures, infrastructures and services that constitute the vital support of housing.The expanded conceptualisation of context assumes that the housing link can mutate its content when it engages with the reality of the city, but the urban can also participate in the opportunities offered by new housing. Therefore, the urban should not be understood as a submission, but as a mutual complement in a wider dialogue Residential complex in Caramoniña. The reuse of the existing city can add a new value that acts as a palimpsest to prolong the life of buildings, recycling them with a new layer of technification or densification. The urban remains a fundamental value to be taken into account in collective housing projects in the 21st century.Living and sharingThe act of sharing is not limited to multi-use and therefore to spatial optimisation; it is about creating communities and fostering the idea of belonging to these communities which are linked to a new sociability {32 Subsided housing, garages and commercial premises||0000001107}. This implies a greater attention to the constructive systematisation and to encourage a more specific study of the static elements inside the dwellings, such as the installations and the structure, which can favour freedom of use Mare de Deu building in Barcelona. The constructive and projective systematics provokes adaptive relations and also a certain degree of perfectibility, understood as a process of transformation of the space insofar as it is resilient to the transformations of the users, to their options and also to the processes of change generated by these relations. Housing is either open or it is not.But it is not only possible to share inside the home. Living alone by no means means living in isolation. The system of shared spaces, activities and uses involves pooling relationships, affections and sensitivities. From the modification of the physical structures of coexistence, architecture can provide a way to approach that ancient aspiration to promote change and improve society.Iconic identitiesIdentity is not a localism but a collective recognition. It is therefore possible to think of a double identity condition, the first is based on the generation of new recognisable images through contemporary architecture Illa de la Llum Diagonal Mar; the second reflects on and links up with historical places and their characteristics Social and relocation housing on Monte Hacho. Assuming that the contemporary city and the peripheral urban growths lack sufficient emblematic buildings, beyond the shopping centres and department stores generated by the leisure culture, would serve to reflect on the capacity of collective housing not only to structure the city, but also to offer recognisable images with a strong impact in dying urban areas.These images no longer reinterpret the past, but explain our current obsessions. The question, therefore, is whether the dwelling should remain silent or not, or whether ordinary, everyday architecture can become an iconic object. At the same time, and without falling into a revival of regional, regionalist or vernacular architecture, there is a proliferation of projects that offer a revision of the local context through contemporary calligraphy.These are works that recover the values of historical construction, establishing as a fundamental premise their collective acceptance and their capacity to generate feelings of belonging and territorial imbrication. Architecture is neither historical nor current, since what is new will soon be old, but is a mechanism that interprets a skilful system, capable of fostering agreements and social cohesion, that generates belonging; and where human beings perceive their own individual and social identity.Construction and technologyFaced with a conception of housing limited to the sphere of the sensible or to the necessary reflection on everyday problems, it seems appropriate to incorporate other variables that distort the usual mechanisms established in the project work.. One of these mechanisms consists of the internalisation of constructive variables based on strict modulation and industrialisation, which are not proposed as a constructive solution to a previous design problem but as a tool for the project itself 57 university housing units on the ETSAV (Vallès School of Architecture) campus. It is very interesting to understand how the ideas, resources and values of the past come alive in the contemporary world, and how these starting points mutate and rejuvenate in contact with our immediate present.The application of low-cost technology with maximum efficiency makes it possible to increase the usable surface area of the homes built at a reasonable price. In this same sense, the increase in the surface area and usable volume of the dwelling gives rise to a cascade of unforeseen activities that turn its inhabitants into real interveners in the processes of change in the use of domestic space Social housing in Cornellà. This is a question that also requires a profound reflection on the term context, understood not only as a variable of a material nature, but also as a set of social, technological and cultural conditioning factors that surround the project. The context is one of the main tools of the project, as it fixes it to the present. And one of the fundamental contexts is the industrial and constructive one.