An iterated Particle.

24-AUG-2020.

A house, is not a space that can be constantly defined the same way, each person has its own impression and feelings around a home, be it theirs or the home of an acquittance. Each house resides as an utmost intimate and personal perception of oneself, a perception ever-changing due to a complex and wide spectrum of factors that each head, each perception shall take into consideration.

Bachelard, in Casa y Universo, in his book, La Poeética del Espacio, would study and analyse the house not solely as a space where something happens, but as an extension of the inhabitant, although the space does not require to have an anthropomorphic shape, it is given elements that would definitely accomplish the mission of it being part of the story acquiring an unique soul, sometimes closely related and others quite deviated from the one its inhabitant possesses.

There is definitely no lack of examples revolving houses possessing a soul, clear examples are common-knowledge stories and tales of haunted houses that even were given the incredible sense of thought (as seen on the movie Monster House). Sometimes even these spaces can become firewood for a society’s burning desire of knowing what was hidden to the eye for years, such as is happening in Complejo Cultural Los Pinos in Mexico, where the presidential housing complex was recently opened up for the public to visit.

Now it is crucial to define how a house is a particle. As we know, matter is built up by particles, atoms, the smallest known form of it, that iterated becomes something more palpable, such as a piece of paper in which a map is printed. In this sense, a map is an universe containing quite insignificant droplets of ink which represent an utmost elemental form of architecture itself, a house.

From small to big: a house can range from being an entire universe for somebody, as its utmost intimate space where someone feels safe, to an incredible iteration conceived as a result of public legislation towards housing that become crucial parts of a skyline. We are now talking about the dream of Le Corbusier that came true in our own country, the master complex designed to build cities of the future: Unités d’habitation.

Discrepancies in how to use particles and how to arrange them to form something bigger often lead to disaster and chaos, an ever-growing enemy that would rise against its creators.

This monster is what Koolhaas defines as a city (in What ever happened to urbanism?), an ever-growing chaos of particles fantastically arranged in a sense that both, creates a magnificent place where to live housing an incredible number of stories which shall amaze whoever visits them, and of course: a urban monster that if handled incorrectly can result in chaos.

Each particle shares a form, a variety of them makes a pleasing contrast between architectural styles. That we can all agree on. What we can not agree about is what is happening behind those fancy, blobby or blocky, colourful or dark, compact or free spaces that essentially resemble in all ways a cube, a box.

The mystery revolving each of those boxes is what gives someone a perception, a guide, firewood for urban tales and comfort for those inside is what makes these particles the status of particles. We know those are there, yet to investigate even further, but in the case of a house, only we know exactly what is it, every definition resides in our own experiences in our own mind where the concept is so abstract we can not make other person understand fully what a house means to us.

We can only know how a particle is and behaves as a result of studying how it conforms something bigger when iterated.

As Milosz would write, in Insomnie:

I say: my mother. It is in you whom I think of, oh House! House of the beautiful dark summers of my childhood, Who never censored my melancholy.

Here, I would add an example of a breakthrough iteration of the house particle that not only defied common conceptions at its time, but set a standard that would be still be present nowadays (and would even become a particle of its own), the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier, the starting point of modern social high-density housing.