saf willkinson lecture: andres jacque “The project failed at the moment the corruption became transparent”. This off-the-cuff comment made in an impromptu conversation on transparency and politics prior to the Wilkinson talk set the tone for the evening. This sort of astute observation is typical of Jacque’s work which is an open conversation on architecture and politics. In his talk “Architecture is Rendered by Society” Jacque explored the notions of political and collective domesticity. His discourse explored architecture in atypical areas including construction sites and share-houses looking at the beautiful and the banal. Of the several notions of domesticity that he spoke on the three that struck a chord for me were the idea of the homes being engaged in multiplicities, homes being the site of political activity and Home = City. Homes are engaged in multiplicities. There is a collective narrative that forms from people’s social network that underpins where they feel at home. Compared to the singular experience of “Little House on the Prarie” where the family’s domestic life revolved around the single house, today’s modern life/family engages with multiple places. This idea was explored through the
2011 | writing
experience a single mother in Madrid whose notion of home was not limited to her 40sqm apartment, but rather extended to engage her office, the downstairs café and apartments of friends and relatives. Thus the city itself becomes a big fragmented house.
During the Sydney Architecture Festival 2011 I volunteered to do some writing for the NSW Board of Architects. The next two pages are extracts of the words submitted for publication on the website.
This idea of domestic life fragmenting into the city is not just limited to one’s social network, rather it is being out sourced. In cities such as Seoul, Korea the domestic needs of the city folk have led to the creation of an industry of domestic sized spaces for super-short term rent. The individual leases an apartment of less than 40 square metres; and then hires rooms of approximately 4x6m at an hourly or daily rate where they can perform traditionally domestic activities such as cooking collectively, singing karaoke, studying or making love. Thus City = Home. This idea was manifested architecturally in the creation of the My Sweet Parliament Home. Andres Jacque is a Madrid based architect who runs two offices – the commercial “Andres Jacque Architectos” and the riskier OIP, Oficina de Innovacion Politica (Office for Political Innovation).
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