The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity - Brossura

Abalos, Inaki

Brossura

ISBN 10: 8425218306 ISBN 13: 9788425218309

Casa editrice: Gustavo Gili, 2001

Riassunto

This text is an essay on the relationship between ways of thinking, the rich seams of contemporary thought and the forms of the house, of planning and living in it. The descriptive method is based on seven guided visits to a group of real or imaginary houses that make up a sufficiently extended panorama for understanding what the 20th century has bequeathed to us in the way of a heritage. In order to choose the houses to visit it was necessary to narrow things down, simplify them, by highlighting a series of archetypes defined by their most pronounced features. The reader, then, won't find any of the masterworks built by modern architects -neither the Villa Savoye, nor Fallingwater, nor the Villa Tugendhat-but mostly imaginary houses, houses constructed by manipulating different references. In short, this book invites the reader on a fantasy tour, one whose aim is not just to celebrate the diversity of the 20th-century house but also to stimulate the pleasure of thinking, planning and living intensely, to promote the appearance of a house that does not yet exist.

Su questo libro

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The Good Life studies the relationship that exists between ways of living, different strata of contemporary thought, and the varied forms of the house, of planning and living in it. It does this by taking the reader on a tour of seven extraordinary houses created during the 20th century, in seven visits or chapters. It is hoped in this way to show how the most prevalent form of thinking and planning domestic space, one still current among architects, is nothing other than a materialisation of certain archetypal ideas about the house which have their origin in one of those strata -positivism-, the stratum, in short, that those who have the authority to do so agree is the only one that is undoubtedly exhausted, whose validity has ended. This book seeks, therefore, to demonstrate that there are other coherent ways of thinking about the house which involve very different design strategies, strategies that lead to domestic spaces that are at a greater or lesser remove from those that are still full of prestige for many professionals. This is not, however, a manual of domestic architecture, nor does it set out to give precise instructions on what to do. It has no immediate practi-cal aim; its objective is to alert the reader and to contribute to a greater awareness of the links between different forms of thinking, of seeing the world, of lifestyles, and design strategies, It argues that the latter are not neutral, but instead limit and embody the whole capacity for critical maneuver our work has. The method employed has been that of guided visits to a small group of dwellings, real or imaginary, by means of which a descriptive panorama is composed of what the 20th century has managed to hand down to us as a heritage. Each chapter is dedicated to visiting the idealizations of the house, of the sphere of privacy, contrived by the differing modes contem-porary thought has adopted. The visit is of the briefest, but the reader who has enough vision and imagination can acquire a precise idea of things, "get the drift" as popular parlance has it. As often happens when making such visits in reality, a welcome is extended in these pages to all those people who, lacking an architectural training as such, have an interest or simply a curiosity in finding out about these archetypes. The book's ulti-mate aim is to describe a century of interventions to do with housing, pos-sibly the issue to which architects have dedicated most time and energy. We have tried to use a non-specialized language and, more importantly, references that pertain more to the field of culture than to the discipline per se. For those interested readers, and also for many professional archi-tects, the book does not add up to a consideration of design techniques, but of the form of living, the way of appropriating private -and by exten-sion, public- space: a study of the good life, of contemporary domestic culture.

Contenuti:

Contents: Prologue Zarathustra's house Heidegger in his refuge: the existentialist house Jacques Tati's machine for living in: the positivist house Picasso on vacation: the phenomenological house Warhol at The Factory: from Freudo-Marxist communes to the New York loft Huts, parasites and nomads: the deconstruction of the house A Bigger Splash: the house of pragmatism Epilogue Achnowledgments Blbliographical note Photo credlts

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Gustavo Gili
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 8425218306
• ISBN 13: 9788425218309
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 200