andres jaque architects: fray foam home

spanish firm andres jaque architects will present their installation ‘fray foam home’ – when interior decoration goes political at the venice architecture biennale 2010. homes are arenas in which the political currently finds opportunities to happen. ‘fray foam home’ is the restitution of the fragmented spaces in which a specific home – with its comforts and supplies are constructed. sweet homes are no longer a political spaces for familiarity, but distant bubbled made foams joined by conflict and fray. distribution and uses of water, energy exploitation, engagement with transgendered individual roles are the arenas in which societies get shaped. what does this home look like? that is what jaque’s ‘fray foam home’ aims to approach.

all images courtesy andres jaque architects

andres jaque states his view on the current home:

even the most intimate and personal action happens in shared multiple locations. washing our skin activates shared contacts with water and infrastructures. we are bubbled foam homes dwellers. there are no agoras any more, but an atmosphere of collective controversies in which we get to make decisions. we no longer go out to emerge as citizens. there is not outside and inside. by committing ourselves with energy efficient or unsustainable expenditure is how we create ourselves both individually and as collectives as components of the public. we live in ‘parliament homes’ ruled by confrontation, but we remain blind to it.

the amount of products we apply to ourselves and use on a daily basis

the tasks we perform and the connection between each

‘fray foam home’ comes from the detailed study of the dependencies and polemics in which a specific flat in madrid’s calle del pez happen. a flat shared by five people with personal daily options. the installation is an approach to the restitution of the distant contextual fragments and public polemics in which their daily lives are installed. what gets visible, gets critical and accountable. what are the politics of design emerging from – opening the black box of expanded multi-located homes? that is the question architecture can build up. a local interior design for global occupancies, which could be detailed in three questions:

1. what if consumption locations and productive ones could be experienced simultaneously? could we produce a notion of relational beauty, closer to ‘parliaments’ than to ‘white boxes’?

2. what if we try to build with resilience and redundancy rather than with zoning and spatial specialization? could a sensitivity for forecasting and optimizing be replaced by one of risk management and adaptability?

3. what if conflict could be politically managed? could the management of difference and controversies be taken to daily life? could we transform the material architectural devices that mediate in our social installation to move from a territorial antagonism to a foam-like agonism?

architecture is often the device to promote territorial distribution in order to ensure realms of ‘sweet local calm’, but it can also be a time in which the architecture of daily realities become compulsory pass points for the polemics in which they are constructed. 

the interior of a home

the interior of a home

andres jaque architects team: alejandro sajgalik, walter cuccuru, carolina silvana vaca, mehrdad nazemi, ángela bailén, patricia acosta, diana calvache, sizhou yang.