Friday, October 29, 2010

Housing or dwelling?


“The different forms taken by dwellings are a complex phenomenon for which no simple explanation will suffice” Amos Rapoport. Form and culture (1969).

So, the factors that differentiate a dwelling of another are so wide that it becomes impossible to extract any standard. To start understanding what a dwelling is, the first thing we should know is who the dweller is. But every single group of people (family) in the world could be the dweller, because they are all different.
Even so it’s possible to establish groups with similar necessities generated by the “SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS”. And that could help to establish different types of houses, but not different types of dwellings, because a house isn’t a dwelling until the dweller come to live in it.“A dwelling is only a dwelling, not when it has a certain form, not when it fulfils certain conditions, which have been written down after long study, not when certain dimensions and provisions have been made to comply with municipal by-laws, but only and exclusively when people come to live in it.” N.J.Habraken. Suports. An alternative to Mass Housing, 1961 (1972).

Then architects design houses, and they are able to make dwellings just when the dwellers participate in the designing, constructing and modifying process.
In conclusion, must a HOUSE adapt to each dweller in order to be the perfect HOME?

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