habere, habitar, habitacle

"Catalan architecture has always been characterized by its pragmatic, non-speculative attitude towards projects. It has tended to solve the particular problems posed in each case without resorting to a priori formulations that were not of a formal order, and has mistrusted theoretical statements that were more or less understood as a limitation of its possibilities of action. This fact has endowed it with a certain flexibility to adapt itself to a diverse, disordered situation with some very restrictive socioeconomic conditions. But it has also rendered itself unfit for making propositions that were not connected to specific conditions and thus have a role with more initiative within the dynamics of society. Consequently, this pragmatic attitude, devoid of debate, has produced in the last few years an architecture more interested in choosing finishings than in making proposals that significantly affect society and force the routine of assignments and programs that it offers. In this sense, the architecture of Alfons Soldevila and Josep Ignasi Llorens is quite exceptional and out of the mainstream...these experimental dwellings or prototypes insistently rise fundamental architectural questions with the intention of redefining the inhabitable space to adjust it to current production means and to social necessities of contemporary life. Aspects such as the type of user, the evolution of family units throughout time or changing ways of life, are found at the very core of these prototypes, which adapt themselves to these requirements to be able to answer them: permitting changes in their spatial configuration, growing or diminishing according to the necessities of its occupants or, simply, allowing its self-construction."
"..housing is, at present, a neglected subject. Witness the case of Catalonia: since the new democratic public administrations have become the main clients for architects, experimental domestic architecture has been reduced to an interstitial role, often limited to suburban single-family houses without a significant presence in the market of collective dwellings..."
"The proposals of Soldevila and Llorens pretend instead to requalify the space of the human dwelling...One of the main characteristics...a container that has an elemental parallelepipedical shape but reproduces the original protection of the cave: a frontal opening and an enclosed rear...A protection that has to be understood not only from a functional point of view but, above all, in its deep psychological sense. This necessity to create a perfectly controllable environment, so different from the maximum exposure of the Farnsworth House..."

from the book "Habitatges experimentals 1971-1994 A.Soldevila-J.I.Llorens, arq." by Enirc Massip i Bosch