Image Credits: View from the draft room towards the living room of the broken house. Photo: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
When it comes to designing a house, it seems there is little space for experimentation nowadays. The program is clearly defined, regardless any variations requested by the client: three rooms instead of two, an open kitchen or no kitchen at all, a studio or a living room where one can also work (specially in these days when remote work became part of the house’s daily routine and space), among other features. And the distribution of the rooms follows standard performative familial actions. However, this has not prevented various architects over time from electing the house as an utopian program and taking it as the basis for various spatial experiments and speculations, transforming the proposals into architectural manifestos that signal moments of rupture by creating new models or paradigms of inhabiting. The manifestos typically develop along two major threads: the House as a territory of formal speculation departing from architectural lexicon of form-function, form-material, etc., and the House as a territory of experimentation departing from cultural problems. This means that the House, although a conservative program of a domestic space, usually associated with privacy, reflects the relation between Man and the environmental, social, economic, and political characteristics of its time.
Southern Patio. Photo: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
History provides us with many examples of Manifesto-Houses. An example would be Villa Almerico Capra — La Rotonda (Vicenza, 1571), designed by Palladio who subverted the original concept of a Villa, intended to support agricultural activities in the Italian countryside, as opposed to the Palazzo, the domestic building in the city par excellence. By removing all the facilites intended for those activities, Palladio designed instead a “stage” for parties for his client’s amusement and highly social life, resulting in a symbolic and autonomous object, a pure exercise on symmetry of a cross inscribed in a circle. The simultaneously particular and universal character of Villa La Rotonda - synthesis and analysis at the same time - has allowed this work by Palladio to have several lives in different places. Imaginary places, physical places, historical places, reappearing in the work of various architects as an example of perfect form governed only by its own order that determines all the elements of its composition, through a universal system of proportions. This change in the villa paradigm is confirmed when Palladio publishes this villa in the chapter dedicated to Palazzos in his I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture).
A contemporary example would be The Rambla-Climate House (Molina del Segura, 2021), designed by the Office for Political Innovation. In this house, the wastewater and organic waste of the residential infrastructure is used to restitute the ecosystem of the laurisilva forest in an elliptical artificially-nurtured-landscape unit. The loss of this ecosystem, due to heavy industrialisation and urbanisation, has affected the Southern European climate as laurisilva plays a key role in the accumulation of water and wet life within dry ecosystems. Designed in collaboration with Universidad de Alicante and a number of advocacy groups of Murcia, this house is part of a collective effort to mobilise suburban homes as actors in a networked reparation of the laurisilva veins.
The Broken House, designed by Portuguese architects Rui Neto and Sérgio Silva (NPS Arquitectos), for Neto and his wife in the city of Porto, may not be immediately recognised as a manifesto. However, it embodies two important characteristics of what we consider a Manifesto-House. Firstly, it addresses the critical problem of what it means to inhabit the world today. Secondly, it represents an exercise in spatial experimentation, even if it emerges from various context-based restrictions, rather than a speculative exercise on pure form.
The mobility that was achieved throughout the 20th century, including the development of transport, technology and telecommunications, the expansion of national economies beyond borders, the democratisation of travel and individual displacement, the outbreak of globalisation, and the dilution of political boundaries and post-colonial dynamics, led to a reconfiguration of the world and domestic space. In this reconfiguration, the position of individuals, families, and their homes became displaced and uncanny, as Homi Bhabha notes in his essay “The World and the Home.” “The border between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting,” writes Bhabha. (1) Following the uprooting of the modern and postmodern eras, the boundaries between public and private space, and between the world and the home, became intermingled and volatile, creating a sense of shock and recognition – defined by Bhabha as “unhomely” — “of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world.” While Bhabha applies this sense of “unhomely” primarily to displaced individuals and families, such as refugees, political exiles, people in transit, always in-between places and times, it reflects a larger condition of humanity today: the precarious and transient position within the world after the de-familiarisation of the home. The home is no longer a static counterpart of the social and historical world. How, then, can one create a dwelling place under such circumstances?
Following the ideas of volatility and transience associated with the rapid pace of transformations, Cacciari, in his book La Città, arrives at the indefinite, homogeneous, and indifferent space of the post-metropolitan territory, where house and not-house are connected and home and not-home are two sides of the same coin. For Cacciari, the territory where we live poses a radical challenge to traditional forms of community life, producing real uprooting. He asks, “Is it possible to live without a place? Is it possible to live where there is no place?” (2) However, he notes that “Living does not occur where one sleeps, sometimes eats, watches television, and plays on the home computer. The dwelling is not the place of living. Only a city can be inhabited, but it is not possible to inhabit the city if it is not arranged for living, meaning if it does not provide places. A place is where we pause; it is a pause, analogous to silence in a musical score. There is no music without silence. The post-metropolitan territory disregards silence; it does not allow us to pause and gather in living. It does not know, and cannot know distances. Distances are its enemy. Every place within it seems destined to crumble and lose intensity until it becomes nothing more than a passage, a moment of universal mobilisation.” (3)
This problem gives rise to a major contradiction because, as Cacciari notes, we are physical bodies or places (the very organisation of molecules), recalling the origin of the word physical, phýsis, which means nature. Only in science fiction literature do bodies transform into pure energy, transmitting themselves through the non-space of information or post-metropolitan territory. “The inhabitants of the territory are required to react immediately, like a ‘healthy’ nervous system, to changes in stimuli, variations in presence or form, with a speed that has no comparison to any other moment in our urban civilisation. Yet, we continue to ask our city to provide us with places of welcome and ‘long durations’ as if our cerebral cortex has, on the one hand, developed forms of impetuous, violent mobility, but on the other hand, there continues to be a deep need for home and protection within our brains. This dissociation is now part of our physiological structure.” (4)
Today, the house must fulfil two conditions: it must create a place within the indifferent space of the post-metropolis, where silence can also be felt, while simultaneously expressing post-metropolitan life, time, and movement. A similar problem arose in architecture at the turn of the century. It was also Cacciari who observed that the houses designed by Adolf Loos played with the disjunction created by the rise of the Metropolis—the Großstadt—and the old bourgeois life, making the irreducible difference between exterior and interior coincide. The exterior of Loosian houses speaks the language of the Capital, a language without qualities, as in Robert Musil’s novel, absorbing the shock produced by the experience of modernity with indifference. Meanwhile, the interior speaks the language of privacy, holding Lou Andreas-Salomé’s box of buttons as the epitome of what money cannot buy — the most valuable thing that an individual can keep away from public space.
The Metropolis, as Cacciari remembers in his book La Città, was structured upon two figures that ruled it: industry and market. The transformation of the Metropolis into the current post-metropolitan territory occurred when the market overcame the industry, even if the factory has a static position within the metropolitan fabric, it creates fluxes of energy, products, money, etc. As Cacciari notes, “The interior that preserves buttons can exist only in the Metropolis, and only as absolutely different from its exterior. The exterior must not betray that which is collected in the interior; the exterior must follow money’s course and remain in its dimension.” (5) But “What is essential is the vast difference between exterior and interior, not the formal solutions revealed by the composition of one or the other. This expanse is the secret of the Loosian house: the measure of this difference is the measure of Loos’ care for Lou’s buttons, that they should have a place that is not a box of wonders.” (6)
For Cacciari, the box of wonders is the poetic whole of interior and exterior, when it is no longer possible to think about an ideal harmony between the two. In the space of the Metropolis, the place of the collected coincides with the irreducible difference between exterior and interior. Loos was probably the architect who best understood this problem, (7) designing architecturally this difference through the invention of the Raumplan. In the Raumplan, exterior and interior are mutually dependent, but from each side, one cannot know what is on the other side. Several authors, including those close to Loos such as Münz, have noticed the economic side of the Raumplan. Others, such as Gravagnuolo, noticed the psychological effect of the Raumplan’s distribution of spaces. The Raumplan results from separating each raum’s plan, either horizontally or vertically, which is usually emphasised by mentioning the different heights of each room regarding their function (a living room as a social space has, for instance, a double-height, whereas the woman’s room as an intimate space has a lower ceiling). The staircase, typically placed at the center of the house, is both fragmented and permeable, creating continuous or staggered connections between spaces. This complex distribution of rooms, their respective interconnections (made possible by the fragmented stairs and interior openings as well), and their relationship to the exterior (mainly through openings that provide light instead of a view upon the Metropolis) makes it almost impossible to represent the Loosian house through traditional means of representation. For Loos, most decisions were made during the construction process, but sometimes he had models with scattered parts to allow him to simultaneously look at the exterior and interior, or, in other words, to the irreducible difference between the two.
The Broken Space — exterior and interior / kitchen and Southern Patio. Photo composition: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
The Broken House, designed by Rui Neto and Sérgio Silva, can be understood as a new chapter following the Loosian problem about the possibility and meaning of dwelling in the post-metropolitan space. Located at a peripheral area of the city of Porto (although Porto might still maintain its forma urbis with its historical centre — now gentrified — and the periphery fuelled by industrial growth, its urban life defines a post-metropolitan space, “juxtaposed” to the city’s physical fabric), characterised by narrow streets and anonymous low-density buildings, a reflection of a process of socio-cultural deprivation, largely due to the acceleration of urbanisation, the house creates in itself that difference signalised by Cacciari: it opens to the exterior and public space, if and when necessary, and it closes upon itself to create a place where the intimate life unfolds and silence is conquered whenever desired.
Interestingly, Rui Neto has been drawing areas of the city of Porto located at the margins of the urbanisation, inhabited by those who live in-transit and in-between, as pointed out by Bhabha. Through his masterful, hyper-realistic drawings, Neto brings visibility to typically invisible fragments of the city, such as interstitial spaces and informal constructions. His work bears witness to the diverse ways in which people inhabit the city, which paradoxically seems to address the problem of post-metropolitan space. This includes the appropriation of public space as an extension of private space, where the boundaries between the home and the world become blurred. Neto also captures ambiguous forms of use, as well as places where materials, textures, and layers of time, decay, and abandonment intersect, sparking the imagination to discover new places in the subterranean ground of fiction. Often presented as diptychs that combine elevation and sectional views above and below ground, Neto’s artworks simultaneously portray real and fictional elements, highlighting the existing tensions. The dual representation of the exterior and interior spaces underscores the differences that exist, rather than aiming to recover a lost unity. Instead, it marks a threshold or border where everything can happen. When encountering Neto’s large-scale drawings, viewers inevitably inhabit these spaces and domesticate what is often considered marginal or strange in the city.
Upon first glance, the street-facing façade of The Broken House may seem unremarkable, much like the exterior of a Loosian house. However, upon closer inspection, its dual character becomes apparent. A black metal bar spans the entire width of the plot, concealing the main entrance to the house and the glazed area that recedes into the street. This area “supports” the entire green wall that rises towards the sky, with an opaque square cut out at the top. The enigmatic façade acts, in a perfect way, in the post-metropolitan space, creating the necessary ambiguity between public and private space. When the black metal bar is fully retracted, it reveals what was previously hidden: a showcase or a window, indicating that the corresponding interior space functions as either a studio or an independent flat.
On the ground floor, the interplay between interior and exterior no longer resembles the Loosian house of the Metropolis. Instead, it engages in a dialogue with the flows of Cacciari’s city-territory, by creating a vague and shapeless space that can have different functions. However, upon entering the house, we encounter a living space, a space to pause, as also demanded by the philosopher-architect. This inhabiting place follows a distinct logic from that of the post-metropolitan space, creating a counterpoint to it. Inside, contact with the exterior is established through two courtyards-gardens, located at the ends of the house’s longitudinal axis. These courtyards allow for total natural illumination of the interior spaces, with the passage of time, the sky, the clouds, the sun, and the rain creating a rhythm closer to that of the physical body. This approach seems reminiscent of Shinohara’s houses in the dense city of Tokyo, reflecting a clear disinterest in the adjacent buildings and street. The Broken House delivers a critical approach to the meaning of inhabiting the post-metropolitan space by juxtaposing two different types of space: the vague and informal space and the domestic space of intimacy. In the first, the world and the home intermingle, in the second, the home closes itself to the world when it desires (while maintaining its media connections).
View of the Living Room with the staircase behind the wood cabin. Photo composition: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
As previously mentioned, The Broken House also represents an exercise in spatial experimentation despite several restrictions. In its place, there was a contemporary ruin of a construction process of a house, abandoned after the outbreak of the 25th of April Portuguese revolution and only resumed with the beginning of The Broken House’s process. Neto and Silva intended to preserve most of the existing structure, reconfiguring the design to adapt to the irregular geometry of the terrain. The name of the house acquires a triple meaning: it makes evident the broken connection between the world and the home, it evokes the process of abandonment and decay of the former structure, and finally, its design follows the many folds and fractures of the narrow and long terrain where it stands. Of course, the challenge was to create an inhabiting place within the post-metropolitan space that allowed those moments of pause and silence. Or, as we would like to summarise: how can the architects compose a sensation of intimacy?
Before explaining how architects can compose a sensation of intimacy, it’s important to clarify what we mean by this term. Sensation of intimacy can be understood as a result of spatial organisation that combines heterogeneous elements, such as planes, materials, vegetation, light, color, etc., to create an effect on one’s nervous system. It’s an immediate bodily reaction to a particular space, as if the space itself has inscribed the body’s sensitive scheme into its composition. It’s worth noting that not every domestic interior is a space of intimacy, as we can sometimes find spaces of intimacy in exterior spaces. Furthermore, it’s important not to confuse sensation with senses. (8) The sensation is not directly linked to a particular organ, but rather a force (or a collection of forces) exerted on the body that captures the sensation through a different sense organ, or even the opposite of the one through which the sensation is conveyed.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water provides a good example of how an architect can create a sensation inside a house through the sound of water. As Portuguese writer José Saramago once said, there is not a more profound silence than that of water, especially at night. Through sound, the inhabitant sees an image of the falling water that cannot be glimpsed from inside the house. This demonstrates how a sensation is always a compound, a fabrication orchestrated by the architect, which is not directed towards a specific sense, but rather plays with and confuses them, creating an ineffable space that produces a magical effect (to recall Le Corbusier’s famous concept to address spatial or architectural arrangements that produce an effect that defies explanation).
The sensation of intimacy is composed of the body’s movements, postures, and gestures within a space at a threshold where the body is abandoned to its natural state, and the space complements it, eliminating any resistance. Or, in other words, when body and space mutually become (the process of becoming is not a mimetic process as some architects, following the phenomenological tradition, understand the relation between body and space). Curiously, one of Neto and Silva’s major preoccupations was the use of apparent precast concrete bricks in a domestic interior whereas, for instance, wood is largely assumed to create comfortable and warmth interiors. Analysing each element autonomously — the apparent precast concrete bricks, the sharp angles of the ceiling, the irregular geometry of the plan, the interior openings, etc. — we can only understand the symbolic atributes of each. However, when arranged in a singular composition, the architects create different sensations, using the balance between opposite elements. For instance, Neto and Silva combine the sloping ceilings in marine plywood with the apparent precast concrete brick walls, balanced in turn with the black volume that encloses the bathrooms (placed at the centre of the house along with the staircase). The tension between exterior and interior spaces creates a paradoxical in-between space (another common feature in the composition of sensations): the interior space presents raw surfaces while the exterior – where the forces of nature are felt and oscillate between violence and calm – presents rich textures and colours. The interior spaces, in turn, are linked through a fragmented and permeable staircase placed at the heart of the house, which resembles Loos’ houses, in a continuous and fluid movement across different spaces with distinct heights.
We are impelled to remember Neto’s large scale drawings and their juxtaposition of different worlds revealed through a large section of reality and fiction. Only by viewing The Broken House through a broken plane or section, as noted in the exhibition’s title, can we fully appreciate the interwoven spaces and compositional elements at play. Yet, the subtle variations in the sky, and the colours of the trees and flowers, are overlooked. It is through the careful play with the light is where the sensation of intimacy unfolds itself at its maximum of intensity. As Neto and Silva write: “The natural light, in a vibrant way, sometimes unveils and animates, sometimes cuts and omits the sweet disorder of the spatial composition.” (9) The house sculpts light not only through various channels — including through interior openings in the bathrooms’ volume — but also by shaping its reflections as it encounters different veils that absorb light in diverse ways. The light that enters the kitchen from the Southern patio is already infused with plant particles that absorb and reflect it, creating a play of shadows that composes a rhythm. As previously mentioned by Neto and Silva, this rhythm makes every element that the light touches vibrate.
The intricately designed staircase positioned at the heart of the house. Photo: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari mention: “If methods are very different, not only in the different arts but in different artists, we can nevertheless characterise some great monumental types, or ‘varieties,’ of compounds of sensations: the vibration, which characterises the simple sensation (but it is already durable or compound, because it rises and falls, implies a constitutive difference of level, follows an invisible thread that is more nervous than cerebral); the embrace or the clinch (when two sensations resonate in each other by embracing each other so tightly in a clinch of what are no more than ‘energies’); withdrawal, division, distension (when, on the contrary, two sensations draw apart, release themselves, but so as now to be brought together by the light, the air, or the void that sinks between them or into them, like a wedge that is at once so dense and so light that it extends in every direction as the distance grows, and forms a bloc that no longer needs a support).” (10) The authors emphasise the case of sculpture, where we can witness the same in architecture, particularly in the example of Neto and Silva’s way of sculpting the light in The Broken House: “These types are displayed almost in their pure state in sculpture, with its sensations of stone, marble, or metal, which vibrate according to the order of strong and weak beats, projections and hollows, its powerful clinches that intertwine them, its development of large spaces between groups or within a single group where we no longer know whether ti is the light or the air that sculpts or is sculpted.” (11)
The sensation of intimacy is independent of each room’s function. In The Broken House, the spaces may perform different functions as the domestic life intertwines with work, but what is noteworthy is that even in areas where work typically takes place, there is still a sensation of intimacy without the need for any gradation or separation (some architectural works create the sensation of intimacy as part of a sequence of spaces, both interior and exterior, or in-between, culminating in the most intimate space, as seen in many Japanese works through the use of various veils or layers).
It is the openness of The Broken House and its spaces that allows for multiple appropriations, making the body feel at home. For example, three steps can easily become a place to sit, and from there, a new perspective towards the Southern patio is revealed. A mezzanine can also be easily transformed into a place to sleep or work. It is not just air and light that flow through The Broken House, but the body at its maximum freedom.
The kitchen, which opens onto the Southern Patio. Photo: Cunha Pimentel. Courtesy of the photographer.
notes
Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home”, Social Text No. 31/32 (Duke University Press, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues, 1992), 141.
Massimo Cacciari, La Città (Villa Verucchio: Pazzini Editore, 2009 [2004]), 36. Translation by the author.
Idem, Ibidem. Translation by the author.
Idem, Ibidem, 56. Translation by the author.
Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture (New York: Yale University, 1993), 181.
Idem, Ibidem, 183.
“In philosophical terms, the problem that presents itself in Loos is that of the possibility and meaning of dwelling in the age of Nietzschean nihilism fulfilled,” Idem, Ibidem, 199.
Our approach to the problem of sensation in an architectural plane derives from Gilles Deleuze’s Aesthetics for whom a work of art is a block of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects. As he, together with Guattari, explains: “Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 [1991]), 164.
Project description provided by the architects Rui Neto and Sérgio Silva.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Op. cit., 168.
Idem, Ibidem.