Atelier da Bouça*
Notes on the practice of chance
The house as a spatial laboratory
Some architecture panics with chance!
Some spatial design wishes to
completely determinate the life that occurs and will always occur within them.
Making an analogy with theater, we would say that they wish in the beginning to
know and give a tacit answer to an argument, a narrative totally predefined. If
this narrative isn’t available in the beginning, becomes itself object of
design in its finitude.
Understanding chance as something
that happens without being consequence of a past event, that is, an effect that
is not explained with a precedent determination, in these design chance it's a
drama, a terror! The spaces that eliminate the surprise, that arrange and
predict all, have so much afraid of bad surprises (few confidence in the space
abilities) that eliminate any chances of good surprises.
Chance is ruthless
Chance exists and it’s
impossible, besides being needless, to design it. As in all tasks that lead
with the course of things in time, we pursuit to design/set the future, this
desire, we know it from the beginning, is in its completeness unachievable, but
who said that we really want to predict all?
Can’t we (nor could we even
wanting…) know chance, and set it? To what extent? To what extent do we want to
close all the ways out and leave a family/institution/community enclosed? Isn’t
comfort the possibility of chance, the multitude of appropriations, the machine
open to its manipulations?
Architecture manipulates the space of chance
“The idea that architecture
should facilitate all movements, likewise, is to assume that the architecture
does not take a philosophical position, for example in relation to the people’s
life, seems to me nonsense. In other words, I prefer a house that hinders me,
or that put obstacles to prevent me of doing silly things and facilitates movements
to make sensible things” Gonçalo M Tavares[1].
Chance can inform the architectonic design
Everything as a tendency to an equilibrium,
things take, naturally, it’s just place, i.e., adapt to the rituals/movements
that we make in space and time.
"Observez un jour,
non pas dans un restaurant de luxe où l’intervention arbitraire des garçons et
des sommeliers détruit mon poème, observez dans un petit casse-croûte
populaire, deux ou trois convives ayant pris leur café et causant. La table est
couverte encore de verres, de bouteilles, d’assiettes, l’huilier, le sel, le
poivre, la serviette le rond de serviette, etc. Voyez l’ordre fatal qui met
tous ces objets en rapport les uns avec les autres; ils ont tous servi, ils ont
été saisis par la main de l’un ou de l’autre des convives; les distances qui
les séparent sont la mesure de la vie. C’est une composition mathématiquement
agencée ; il n’y a pas un lieu faux, un hiatus, une tromperie. Si un cinéaste
non halluciné par Hollywood était là, tournant cette nature morte, en ‘gros
plan’, nous aurions un témoin de pure harmonie" Le Corbusier[2].
And if, even
separating reality from appearance, our routines move faster than the time that
objects take to set? And if we don't want to install perennially and obtusely
the comfort and, on the contrary, through the strange disposition of object, we
want the space to oblige us to change?
Intensifying,
“practicing chance” informs the practice of design…
When one passes
from a simple observer to player, when we explore the limits of flexibility and
refine/radicalize our own experiences (laboratorial), following the scientific
method (problem - premise resulting from experience -, hypothesis - project
that answers the problem - , experience - space construction -, observation - analysis of the advantages and
problems imposed by the new space, leading to new premises – we gather an
amount of information liable of generalization and therefore useful to
qualify/guaranty flexibility devices to the spaces that we propose.
It is in this
way and with this aim that we (ab)use intensively (of) the house as a spatial
laboratory…for the pleasure of chance as manipulation of the predefined, or
just because we like beginnings.
___________
*Filipa de Castro Guerreiro e Tiago Macedo
Correia [Atelier da Bouça]
They born in
1976, graduating in the Faculty of Architecture of Porto in 2000. Their
activity as architectures is going on since 2001 and in 2008 they establish the
Atelier da Bouça. Filipa teaches in
FAUP and was from 2008-2010 responsible for the division of communication in
the OASRN. Both (ab)use from their house as spatial laboratory and share the
obsession of the void as matter of architecture.
Other Articles in the same issue:
GODOFREDO PEREIRA
MIGUEL LEAL
PEDRO LEVI BISMARCK
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