hintergrund 07

Description

“Our societies are beginning to turn away from their settled ideas of home. Our old images of dwelling, however, are not yet countered by new ones, none that would answer the question: How will we live? The process of dematerialization and dehistoricization of contemporary living environments seems, many agree, unstoppable. Are we living in a time in which even architecture with its “figures” and “images” can no longer provide an adequate answer? Is the house as a form, as a built, designed and social construction at the mercy of the qualitatively new reality of reprivatization and deregulation?
Does it break all the usual public, political, creative regulatory fantasies? In many countries, even in the Western world, there is at least a growing concern about the loss of concepts of belonging and home. Irrational fears are circulating. For example, the fear of the seemingly uncontrollable innovations of the dislocated. The banishment of people who no longer meet the standards of normality has become commonplace, as has the poverty economy of living in the favelas. Many of these negative, fearful reactions arise in direct interplay with a certain utopian speculative frenzy about the redemptive and transformative power of architectural imagery. Architecture has become part of the culture industry. In the meantime, planners have apparently understood how limited their political agency is, which is to be administered in various model settlements as a liberal remedy for social illnesses. And the new networks of infrastructure, information, images, stylistic production and power no longer fit so easily on drawing paper. This is precisely why it seems so urgent to ask about the way in which this process co-constructs the ideas of a new housing and how the lifeworlds of the residents are constructed by the supply economy of contemporary housing.(…)” (Georg Schöllhammer).