Architecture of Necessity
The city’s inhabitants are aware of their real needs, driven by the inevitable, they transform their city under a new order: The Moral Modulor. He embodies the human potential to understand urgency and inscribe it in space. He adds, to the order established by human dimensions, the moral dimension that necessity recovers. Urgency provides for the individual a foundational alibi. Every sexual or physiological impulse, every birth and even death, will provoke the appearance of new walls, columns, stairways, new windows or plumbing and electrical systems.
Form follows Necessity. The modified houses of Havana express this relationship. It’s an Architecture of Necessity.
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"Since necessity plays a central role in the generation and regulation of this kind of architecture, I associate it with natural forms known as stalactites and stalagmites, where the shape is the result of a fluid movement of materials attracted by gravitational force. In this popular architecture, the irrepressible movement of materials also produces a grid of lines and holes, a superimposition of layers and structures that, just as in the natural process of sedimentation, are supported one over the other. This fluid movement responds to a strength as powerful and unavoidable as gravity, the force of necessity.”
Ernesto Oroza from For an Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience, 2006.
He lived with his mother in a space that was so small that it couldn’t legally be considered a house. He expanded into the hallway, built a kitchen and refurbished the bathroom. He changed the status of the property and acquired a title for it. He got his hands on a permit to build on the roof, as he thought about moving out on his own. In order to do this he had to build an exterior stairway. He set to work on the structure indoors and started the paperwork to divide the property. The appearance of an exterior stairway before the process of dividing the house was finished could be considered a violation, and he could be fined or even lose all property rights to the house he had built.
He understood that the description of the house and its parts depends on the cultural understanding that we have of it, that laws depend on this understanding.
Then, what is a stairway? How does one describe it? Could he build a structure in front of his doorway that looks nothing like a stairway but serves the same function? Maybe just objects stacked in such a way that one can climb and descend them? Or an object by Ettore Sottsass, a stack that includes all of Feijóo’s books, a Franz West sculpture, anything?
He decided on a conceptual shortcut: he built the stairway and waited to be fined. In this way, he gained time. The Law demanded that he cease building the stairway until the paperwork needed to divide the property was finalized.
Years went by. He used the unfinished stairway.
What’s a finished stairway?
Vivía con su madre en un espacio tan pequeño que no podía considerarse, legalmente, una casa. Amplió hacia el pasillo, construyó una cocina y mejoró el baño. Cambió el estatus del espacio y obtuvo un título de propiedad. Consiguió un permiso para ampliar la vivienda en la azotea pensando independizarse. Al hacerlo debió construir una escalera interior y comenzar los trámites para el desglose de la propiedad. La aparición de una escalera exterior antes de tiempo podía considerarse una infracción y podía ser multado o perder el derecho a la propiedad de la vivienda que había construido.
Entendió que la descripción de la vivienda y de sus partes depende del concepto cultural que tenemos de ellas, que la aplicación de la ley depende de dicho concepto.
Entonces, ¿Qué es una escalera? ¿Cómo se describe? ¿Podía construir delante de su puerta un objeto diverso de lo que creemos es una escalera, pero capaz de brindar la misma función? ¿Algo cómo... materiales almacenados de tal manera que puedes ascender y descender sobre ellos? ¿Un objeto de Ettore Sottsass, todos los libros de Samuel Feijóo, una escultura de Franz West, cualquier otra cosa?
Decidió tomar otro atajo conceptual: empezó a construir la escalera y esperó ser multado, ganó tiempo, la ley le exigió detener inmediatamente la construcción del objeto hasta que legalice el desglose. Pasarán años. Mientras usará una escalera inacabada.
¿Qué es una escalera acabada?
