T e m p o r a r y H o u s i n g
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years the city has exploded. Since 1999 to 2009 were made 300 million of cubic
meters/year. In a single decade, about 3 billion of cubic meters have been built ...
Between 1990 and 2005 were processed about 3.5 million hectares
"(Ricci, 2011).
The environmental impact of cities is therefore enormous, both for the growing
population and for the quantity of natural resources that cities consume. From the
ecological point of view, the growth of per capita consumption of energy, in the last 40
years, has increased faster than the human population (M. Wackernagel, WE Rees,
1996) and it will means a strong reduction of natural resources available.
In opposition to this growth and to the dispersed development in the landscape, in the
city centres, there are many abandoned areas outdated in relation to the needs of
society, entire buildings with unsold housing, abandoned houses and a significant
increases in home values. "
Since 2007 to 2010 there are 120,000 unsold apartments,
about 40% of those already realized… Also there are 5.2 million of empty houses in 10
million of vacant building ... Despite the growing number of empty houses, in 2010 at
least 230,000 families living in cohabitation and 70,000 in precarious housing conditions
"(Ricci, 2011).
These data also demonstrate an uneasiness of the population in the concept of living
today, especially in relation to residential assets non-compliance if compared to the
needs of contemporary. The housing situation of older people, the prolonged presence
of young people within the household, the forced cohabitation, the improper housing
solutions offered to immigrants and, in general, the difficult problem of housing for new
contemporaries households, demonstrates that there’s a gap between the traditional
organization of living spaces and the emerging many lifestyles. These new categories of
users require different spaces from traditional house: they need small spaces that can
change with variations of their needs, to use fixed-term, also available at low cost.
The life of the contemporary society no longer plays in the local environment of the
hometown, but it extends to a wider geographical landscape, to metropolitan area
characterized by mobility. Home, from furnishings, real estate and ancestral home,
becomes chattel, object of consumption. The meaning and the role of social housing
have changed; house is no longer simply the family shelter, but becomes also a place to
work, to relax, to meet and to exchange. Inside the dwellings there is a greater need for
public spaces, looking at the relationship with the outside. Dwelling not as a house for
life, fixed in a certain place, but increasingly home in every place strongly connected with
the world and the society increasingly multimedia, dynamic and global in which timing
and connections are more instantaneous and, conversely, the spaces and distances are
increasingly extended and joined.
Methodological approach
This is the starting point to analyze what are now the roles and the responsibilities of
architects who necessarily are called both to realize architectures in specific historical
and cultural contexts and to meet environmental, social and economic instances.
Designers have the ethical and professional duty to understand the evolutionary trends
of the architectural debate and to give plausible answers that take into account both all
these aspects and the society changes that necessarily transforms also architecture.
Taking the needs of contemporary life will probably entail both to experiment less
conformist general patterns of living, space organizations different from those required
by our regulations, structures much more open to differences of living and to change the
point of view with respect to cultural inertia, management and regulations that propose a
residential housing model too hard compared to current needs.
The criteria guiding the applicants seem linked, on one side, to the miniaturization and
the ergonomics optimization of personal living space, and secondly to the increase of
living spaces for collective use, in an attempt to answer to two seemingly incompatible
