Architect: Andres Jaque
Architect director: Andres Jaque
Collaborators: Alejandro Sajgalik Walter Cuccuru Carolina Silvana Vaca Mehrdad Nazemi Ángela Bailén Patricia Acosta Diana Calvache Sizhou Yang Silvia Rodríguez
Location: Venecia Italy
Date: 12/2010
Client: Bienal de Venecia


FRAY FOAM HOME By Andrés Jaque
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, supplies and fictions- is constructed. Sweet Homes are no longer apolitical spaces for familiarity, but distant-bubbled-made-foams joined by conflict and fray. Distribution and uses of water, energy exploitation, right for access to fiction, engagement with transgendered individual roles are the arenas in which societies get shaped. What does this home look like? That is what FRAY FOAM HOME aims to approach.

Even the most intimate and personal action happens in shared multiple locations. Washing our skin activates shared contracts with water and infrastructures. Lotions to prevent its aging make our skin to inhabit labs where they get tried on mice. We are bubbled-foam-homes dwellers. There are no agoras any more, but an atmosphere of collective controversies in which we get to take 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 install ourselves both individually and as collectives as components of the public. We live in ‘Parliament Homes’ ruled by confrontation, but we remain mainly blind to it.

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 lifes 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:

1010 ja frayfoamhome bvenecia 006

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 for architectures of daily realities becoming compulsory pass points for the polemics in which they are constructed.

 

Architects: Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation

andres jaque
www.andresjaque.net

NYC
43-01 21st Street
LIC, New York
NY 11101
office.ny@offpolin.com

MADRID
(+34) 910 572 163
Calle Arriaza 6
28008, Madrid, SPAIN
office.madrid@offpolinn.com

Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN) is an international architectural practice, based in New York and Madrid, working at the intersection of design, research, and critical environmental practices. The office develops projects in different scales and media, intended to bring inclusivity into the built environment.

Currently, the office works on projects for Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Art Institute of Chicago, Lafayette Anticipations, CA2M, Real Madrid, Colegio Reggio, and Grupo La Musa.

In 2016, OFFPOLINN received the Frederick Kiesler Prize from the City of Vienna; the office has also been awarded the SILVER LION for Best Research Project at the 14th Venice Biennale and with the Dionisio Hernández Gil Award.

OFFPOLINN’s projects have been the object of solo exhibitions at MoMA, MoMA PS1, MAK Vienna, Princeton University, RED CAT Cal Arts Contemporary Art Center in Los Angeles, the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine de Paris, and Tabacalera in Madrid. Its work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, ZKM (Karlsruhe), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, London Design Museum, Whitechapel Gallery (London), Z33 (Hasselt), the Schweizerisches Architektur Museum (Basel), Lisbon and Oslo architecture triennales, and the Venice, Chicago, Gwanju, and Seoul architecture biennales.

OFFPOLINN’s work has been published in the most important architectural design outlets including A+U, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, The Architectural Review, Abittare, Arquitectura Viva, and in publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and El País.

Andrés Jaque
Founder Principal

Andrés Jaque founded the Office for Political Innovation in 2003. He has brought a transectional approach to architectural design; practicing architecture as the intervention on complex composites of relationships, where its agency is negotiated with the agency unfold by other entities.
Andrés Jaque is director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He has also been visiting professor at Princeton University and The Cooper Union.
Andrés received his PhD in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, where he also received his M. Arch. He has been an Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s Tessenow Stipendiat and Graham Foundation grantee. In 2018 he co-curated Manifesta 12 in Palermo.
His books include Transmaterial Politics (2017), Calculable (2016) PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2013), Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool (2013), Dulces Arenas Cotidianas (2013), Everyday Politics (2011), and Melnikov. 1000 Autos Garage in Paris 1929 (2004). His research work has been included in publications like Perspecta, Log, Thresholds and Volume.