Some About Architecture

STORIES OF HOUSES are examples of homes from which we can all learn: both customers when considering the commissioning of a project, such as architects to understand and assess the client's life.

How could it be housing an architect who designs his young sister when she becomes a widow? What can an architect offer when his client in a wheelchair asks for a complex design of the house that will be your world? And when some art lovers offer total freedom when designing the house? How is it that his neighbors house architect tiroteen most international prestige? ...

Some About Architecture

Start today published a series of articles that seek to respond to questions about the intimacies and origins of important international houses. You try to fill the void created by so many books of history of architecture that by neglecting these extreme personal sources, forget the multidisciplinary character of architecture. The houses have been analyzed, therefore, chosen by the essential criterion of having, in addition to the ingredients of a good architecture and an architect with appreciation, some clients tell a passionate story that generates the project. Stories of Houses include information about customers, their requests and needs, without which no one comes to understand the end result.

contemporary homes
From Laugier hut, which illustrates primitive architecture, to the homes of Abalos and Herreros Architects based on the phenomenon of the Swatch watch, through the House of the Future, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson marriage; the study of housing has been linked to the time in which they were built. Beyond the styles and fashions, Stories of Houses deals with feelings and passions which help to establish an analysis of time to which they belong. Examples of architectures that are always current, since they deal with personal emotions with which we all identify.
The development of housing program that clients is a process that is reversed later when the house molds the life of its inhabitants. The furniture, memories, inherited objects and collections; they are all symbols of what we are or what we want to be. You could say that if the facades of the houses are inside the city, the interiors of the houses exterior of their inhabitants. Consequently, the history of the dwelling derives from the plurality of the society in which it is built, education and imagination of the architect and the user's life. It is here, in short, to assert a stronger relationship between client and architect.
The published material has the rigor of being corrected and approved by the architects of the houses. They are items of newly built homes, although some of them are already ruined. Only one case a project is not built, the architect Enric Miralles. His recent death did not allow him to do it. He dedicated these items.

Captions.
a. Marc-Antoine Laugier, The rustic cabin in Essay on Architecture (Paris 1753).
b. The House of the Future by Alison and Peter Smithson was presented at the annual exhibition Ideal House organized in 1956 by the Daily Mail of London. It was a home-produced series that included the forecast of what will be available in twenty-five years.
c. The AH architects Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros (1994), households react to the conventional dwelling, changing their image depending on the environment where they are located.
d. The facades of the houses are inside the city. View of downtown Reykjavik
e. Home studio architect John Soane built in London in the early nineteenth century. Its interior externalizes its inhabitants.

Barcelona Architect, Enric Miralles

In 1996 he was commissioned to Barcelona architect Enric Miralles design a wooden house in a garden near Copenhagen. The project was developed with his wife, architect Benedetta Tagliabue, and the result was a house that came to reflect the life of a family.
Although cancer death prevented the young architect perform home last September, a construction of the house was installed in Diagonal Mar Park Barcelona, between a pergola full of birds, as the projected Miralles.

Enric Miralles

Building time

Denmark still survives in the ancient tradition of building tiny houses as "cabins" in the orchards situated on the outskirts of cities. These groups are called casitas Kolonihaven and its only function is to protect their owners from the cold and rain when they spend time in nature. The new Kolonihaven near Copenhagen groups differ greatly among cherry casitas. Are the works of fourteen prestigious architects were invited to build the various shelters with the only condition not exceed 6 m2.

 
The couple Miralles and Tagliabue generated their project starting from his interest in collecting over time. From that starting point, explained the architects, "the house becomes a calendar". It is a place to feel spend time looking at nature while children play and parents talk around a table. In addition to the drawings and models, the pair of architects illustrated their explanations by a German almanac showing flowers of different months of the year, with their flowering periods: chicory in the mornings of February, water lilies in June, marigolds during September days and carnations open throughout December.

Over time is also recorded to draw the floor of the house. Enric and Benedetta gave their small daughter a miniature chair and the girl began to play with her moving and making use of it to take its first steps. As if it were to draw these movements on the ground, parents generated the plan of the house. 

Since its limits born a wooden structure that forms the volumes that involve, exactly as does a dress, both on the movement of the girl with her chair and adults at the table. At this point, the architects extracted from the book of Le Corbusier, The Modulor 2 the cartoon where a girl asks an adult play with her, inviting him to enter through a small door to the world of its size, "P'pa, joues viens chez moi! ... "Hence the house vary in height. It has a very low ceiling in the children's room, which rises in the living room of adults. This change of scale entails two entrances to the house, one being a door thumbnails for the girl. Therefore, the house, seen through its section, insists capture time; the house grows with the inhabitant, from childhood to becoming an adult.

The focus of this type of tiny shelters is the passing of life. Its function is precisely that, and not much else. So if it is true the saying that an architect is measured by projecting a housing; that same architect you may be measured as a person by projecting a small house for a Kolonihaven. This is the kind of project that, in fact, the architect is entrusted describe how watching life.

Perhaps for this reason, Enric Miralles included his daughter in the development of the cottage in Kolonihaven. He recognized it as a taxpayer and wrote his name on the long list of collaborators project members. It was a mix of private and professional life, something that Enric always did.

Captions.
A-Enric Miralles (1955-2000) and Benedetta Tagliabue (n. 1963), founding architects EMBT. (Photographer: Giovanni Zanzi)
-A Little girl taking her first steps with the help of a miniature chair.
-The House was like a dress that wraps the movements of parents and those of a child.
-built For the exhibition "Cases Impropies" (MACBA, 2001), the house can now be enjoyed in Diagonal Mar Park (Photographer: Alex Gaultier)