{"id":17021,"date":"2014-09-20T23:15:53","date_gmt":"2014-09-20T21:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/in-the-foam-of-cohabitation-the-apartment-as-autogenous-bubble-of-co-isolated-existence-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-15T11:28:58","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T09:28:58","slug":"in-the-foam-of-cohabitation-the-apartment-as-autogenous-bubble-of-co-isolated-existence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/in-the-foam-of-cohabitation-the-apartment-as-autogenous-bubble-of-co-isolated-existence\/","title":{"rendered":"In the foam of cohabitation – The apartment as autogenous bubble of co-isolated existence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who studies the history of modern architecture in relation to the forms of life found in a mediatized society will immediately realize that the two most successful architectural innovations of the 20th century \u2013 the apartment and the sports stadium \u2013 are directly related to the most prevalent socio-psychological tendencies of this epoch: the setting free of solitary individuals with the help of individualized home and media technologies, and the aggregation of masses, unified in their excitement, with the help of staged events held in \u201cfascinogenetic\u201d mass structure. Fir now, we will not emphasize that the effective and imaginary synthesis of modern society is more likely to take place through mass media \u2013 that is, through the telecommunicative integration of nonassembled people \u2013 that through physical assembly; meanwhile, the operative synthesis of society is more likely to organize itself through market relationships. The modern apartment [\u2026] is the material realization of a tendency toward cell-formation, which can be recognized as the architectural and topological analogue of the individualism of modern society. [\u2026] One can also read, in the evolution of apartment construction, that nothing is less based on presuppositions than the seemingly natural expectation there should be at least one room for every person or one living unit per head. [\u2026]
\nWe will define the apartment as an anatomic or elementary \u201cegospheric\u201d form \u2013 and thus, as a cellular word-bubble, the massive repetition of which generates individualistic foams. There is no moral judgment tied to this conclusion. [\u2026] The only new thing offered is the pointed remark that the modern egoist has started subscribing to the Daily Me. We will also keep our distance when terms like \u201cspatial existenz minimum\u201d are brought into play. The idea of minimum, almost whenever used, is a false description of the concept that modern thought on living and dwelling revolves around as it attempts to define it.
\nTo get closer to understand the phenomenon of the apartment, one must take note of its close alliance with the principle of seriality, without which the crossing over building (and manufacturing) into the age of mass- and prefabrication could not be imagined1. Just as, according to El Lissitsky, constuctivism represent the transfer point between painting and architecture, so too does serialism represent the transfer point between elementarism and social utopianism. In serialism \u2013 which regulates the relationship between part and whole trough precise standardization, so that decentralized fabrication and centralized installation become possible \u2013 lies the key to the relationship between cell and cellular compound. Just as the composition of the cell, by fully returning to the elementary level, accommodates itself to analytical thinking, so does the building of houses on the basis of these elements suggest a combinatorics \u2013 or better, a form of \u201corganic construction\u201d \u2013 with the goal of generating architecturally, urbanistically, and economically tenable ensembles out of modules. The great diversity of styles with which modern architects responded to the provocation of modular building is evidence that the stacking of a great number of cellular units was from the beginning meant to be more than a random or mechanical addition of elementary blocks. A trajectory that branches out in many directions runs from Le Corbusier\u2019s plan for a light-suffused villa of 1922, as well as his projects for cross-shaped (1925), star-shaped (1933), and lozenge-shaped (1938) towers, to the sculptural towering of cell in building-block-like structures, like the famous 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo by Kisho Kurosawa. The vertical agglomerate capsular units is developed here into an aesthetic phenomenon with its own intrinsic values. Other architects interpreted this by stacking living modules on top of one another in mushrooms and treelike structures.
\nThe 60-story twin towers Chicago\u2019s Marina City apartment complex rise in petal-shaped floors with their characteristic curved balconies. Eve though larger complexes are, by necessity, formed through the addition of elementary units, and thus occasionally appear to be only crudes stacks, the nevertheless possesses certain intrinsic macro-sculptural values. The syntax of the apartment building would prevent a crude stacking anyway, as without the connection between units through corridors, stairs, elevators, or ductworks, they would be neither functional nor accessible.
\nThe apartment as living cell represents the atomic level in the field of habitat conditions: just as the living cell in the organism simultaneously embodies the biological atom and the generative principle [\u2026], modern apartment construction develops from the habitat-atom \u2013 the one-room apartment with its single occupant as the cellular nucleus oh his private world bubble. With the return to the cellular unit, livable space itself brought to its elementary form. [\u2026]
\nThe modern reapproximation between architecture\u2019s concept of cell and that of microbiology did not, by the way, take place without a certain legitimacy: when British physician Robert Hooke introduced, in his 1965 work Micrographia, the biological concept of cell to describe the dense arrangement of discrete cavities in a piece of cook (discovered under his microscope), he was inspired by the analogy of rows of monks\u2019 cells in a monastery.
\nWith the push of modern architecture toward the idea of the reduced living unit as an ideal type, the concept of the cell returns to its starting point after its productive exile in microbiology \u2013 but this time, loaded with the surplus value of its analytical precision and constructive flexibility. The emancipated living cell formulates a concept of the minimal architectural and sanitary conditions necessary for autonomy, which have to exist for the possibility of being able to live on one\u2019s own to be formally fulfilled. [\u2026] This single bubble in a \u201cliving-foam\u201d forms a container for the self-relationships of the occupant, who establishes himself in the living unit as the consumer of its primary comforts: for him, the vital capsule of the apartment serves as the stage for his self-pairing, as the operating room for his self-care, and as immune system in a highly contaminated field of \u201cconnected isolations\u201d, also known as \u201cneighborhoods\u201d. [\u2026]
\nThe \u201caphrogenic\u201d3 character of the apartment arises (on the level of executed architecture) from the fact that the one-room apartment is usually found in buildings arranged as aggregation of typified living units according to a general plan. The apartment house (or the unit\u00e9 d\u2019habitation), in which a multitude of units are stacked next t and above one another, represents a social space-crystal or a rigid body of foam. These forms nevertheless share the principal of c-isolation with flexible or soft foams \u2013 that is, the division of space through shared walls. [\u2026]
\nIn a social foam, the island effects that every cell claims for itself is thwarted by the density of the stacked cells. Unwelcome communications is the result. Based on this observation, the more recent architecture of apartment has recognized the task of keeping the stress of the coexistence of \u201cconnected isolations\u201d units as low as possible. When this is not resolved, often prove themselves to be hotbeds of social pathologies, for which Le Corbusier once offered the formula ex negativo, when he stated that a building had to provide \u201cpsychic ventilation\u201d. An architecturally successful living unit does not just represent a piece of enclosed air, but rather a psycho-social immune system that is capable of regulating the degree to which it is sealed from the outside on demand. [\u2026]
\nAs the elementary egospherical form, the apartment is the place where the symbiosis of family members, who have formed the primary living community sine time immemorial, become dissolved in favor of the symbiosis between the solitary individual, himself, and his environment. It is beyond a doubt that with the transition to contemporary monadic living a profound turning point has been reached in the ways and means of the being-together of persons with like and with others. [\u2026]
\nWhile the monk\u2019s cell materializes an ascetic, outer-wordly individualism, contemporary apartment culture. Together with its egotechnical apparati, support an hedonistic, inner-wordly individualism. This presupposes the individual\u2019s unrelenting self-observation of any metabolic and aggregative change in all of its dimensions. Individualism is a cult of digestion that celebrates the passage of foods, experiences, ands information through the subject. As all is immanence, the apartment becomes an integral toilette: everything that happens here is under the premise of end use in every respect. Eating\/digesting; reading\/writing; watching television\/opining; self-covery\/self-engagement; self-arousal\/self release. As a microtheater of autosymbiosis the apartment sheathes the existence of individuals who apply for experience and significance.<\/p>\n

The text featured here is an extract from \u201cSph\u00e4ren III – Sch\u00e4ume\u201c, Suhrkamp, 2004<\/em><\/p>\n