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requirements that characterize the demand for individual housing: to reduce the
individual cost of housing and to create a "complete" habitat, where it’s possible to meet
all foreseeable needs of everyday. In accordance with the new ways of living, home
must achieve the highest degree of flexibility, grouping and setting clearly what is
permanent and what is changeable.
Moreover, the contemporary western culture is torn between the tradition of building
manufacturing as a permanent structure and the social instability due to sudden changes
which have marked the life of humanity and led new demands for mobility. They are
mainly due to the re-distribution of resources and to economic progress, but they are
also the result of forced migration of populations in search of greater economic stability
and social security and due to the phenomena of emergency and to the perpetuation of
natural disasters. Therefore, temporary and transitory building is now almost a necessity,
given the increasing need for a temporary building solutions, designed to meet new
housing needs.
The temporary concept is also opposed to the permanence one, which it characterizes
the sedentary society, where every individual has a tendency to stabilize home in the
final settlements. This concept is always associated with the idea of durability, stability
and permanence in time and space. In contrast, the concept of the temporary living
binds to idea of lightness and instability.
The contemporary design is then called to find a relationship between the character of a
permanent construction built several thousand years ago that compares with different
culture of living and its outward expressions and the local character of temporality that is
now increasingly widely applied to living space and to building architecture. Temporary
solutions that add to the architectural question always tied to the concept of space, the
idea of time like a sort of deadline, “best before” for architecture (C. Price, 2003).
It’s a strong subversion of the concept of stability which asks to the designers to think
about the new relationship of temporary architectures that can arise in, on and with the
built, on a historic town and pre-existing strongly consolidated, durable and multiform but,
at the same time, also obsolete and inadequate to meet the needs and the dynamism of
a society and of a landscape in constant evolution (Fig.3). The concept of a temporary
nature is therefore no longer be explained by a quick use and defined in time of a type of
housing but rather on the need and the possibility of a continuous re-configuration and
re-allocation of the living spaces at different scales of project and to a reversible
ownership of the territory. Buildings occupy area just for a defined time or not it all
because they go to saturate the full.
Temporary architecture allows also responding adequately to the current debate on the
many-abandoned area in the heart of cities, or on obsolete buildings left by our
predecessors, giving them new life. Reuse, recycling as a design strategy for our city,
but also as a key to respond with solutions to the issue of energy sustainability.
Ecological urgency therefore both in terms of consumption of soil and environment both
in the behaviour of buildings, such as objects that don’t consume energy but able to work
with climate or, in some cases, also as producers themselves of energy. This means, in
the building construction, changing the point of view, according to an approach
"climatically aware" i.e. working on the buildings’ characteristics, in terms of morphology,
density, shape, choice of materials and techniques before implants.
Densification of cities, soil saturation, obsolescence of the Italian building constructions,
change in the context of needs of today's society and energy problems are thus all
issues that can be answered in a synthetic way in temporary building solutions that are
flexible, adaptable and reversible.
The new forms of expression are:
temporary living, transitional living, hybrid living, online
living
and
common living
are all solutions that, albeit to varying degrees, are affected by
an element of temporariness and that, in relation to the different ways of conceiving the
design and construction of architecture, can be traced to three different aspects: the
