IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

Casa Comum [common/collective/communitarian house/home]
Architectures for an Intermediary Space
Nuno Travasso
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
This research pursuits an idea of collective dwelling. An idea which is not strictly related
to a type or a form or an image, but which concerns a way of living and the essence of the
space that provides lodging for it. Such as the main purpose of building a house is to create
a home, also the design of collective housing should have as main purpose the
materialization of an idea which is yet to be defined. “Casa Comum” (common home) is
one approach to this urgently needed idea.
This study is a domain with an identity of its own created by the constant interaction of
multiple external fragments. These fragments are here called informants. They are the
material elements that support this research and they can be divided in three types:
bibliography, facts (specific spatial situations) and personal experience.
In search of what is (or what could be) the role of collective dwelling in the construction of
the city and in the definition of the way we inhabit the world, the research started with an
analysis of the way man relates with the world and with the contemporary context. From
this analysis it was realized that man inhabits only what he is capable of understand and
control. It was also realized that each day it is harder for us to understand and control the
world we live in as it is presented to us: fractured, built by nomadic and ephemeral
fragments incapable of creating a coherent unity. A world that is the result of two opposed
but intensely related movements: individualization and globalization. The result of these
two movements is the gradual emptying of all intermediary scales: of all groups and
communities, of all spaces in between. Hence the necessity of the establishment of an
intermediary realm between the intimate and the global domains, as a way of creating the
idea of a continuous, articulated and understandable world. If each man sees his home as
the centre of his own world and if houses – and in specially, collective housing – are the
material of which cities are mainly built, so collective dwelling can and should have a main
role on the construction of this idea of world.
“Casa Comum” is therefore presented as an expansion of the idea of home beyond the
private realm. It proposes the creation of an inhabitable sphere intimately connected to the
idea of home on the common domain. In other words, the establishment of a space and a
community external but contiguous to the private space with which the inhabitant should
identify himself and to which he should feel to belong. In this way it is possible to define
the needed intermediary realm.
The idea of “Casa Comum” is built on four main concepts – meeting space, expanded
home, intermediary space and construction of the city – associated to four architectural
principals – atmosphere, definition, articulation and prosthesis – based on which several
design mechanisms are presented. In this way it is created a model which is, at the same
time, construction of the idea of “Casa Comum” and means for the materialization of
this idea. A model that establishes itself as an idea of architecture and as basis for a future
architectural practice.
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