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How will our relationship with architecture change after the coronavirus? Will we be more aware of where we live? More critical? More conservative? After two months of confinement, we all intuit what works and what is wrong in our houses and streets . Why did Spain glaze its balconies? Because their houses are small and the exterior is hostile. Why do the floors have inflexible distributions? Because that is a market value. And how will the houses that we demand from now on be? For that there are contradictory answers: they will be more open to the world or more closed in on themselves.

«Most of us have not suffered great dramas: neither wars nor disasters ... We had climate change, but the coronavirus came forward and created a feeling of vulnerability. Now we will wait for the protection architecture. The funny thing is that this desire can mean opposite things. I understand people who now long for a townhouse and a garden but there is another way to approach vulnerability.

The Madrid architect Iñaki Alonso speaks on his eternal eve of opening a new apartment in the Entre Patios cooperative, a group of houses in Vallecas that he has also designed and advertises as a co-housing. The house is smaller, "calculate 10% less space per floor", but the neighbors share services: "A room with a kitchen so that on my birthday I can bring 15 friends. Another room to work ... There are cooperatives that have a guest room that the neighbors reserve ", explains Alonso.

"What matters is rebelling against the idea of ​​the building as a storehouse of isolated lives in which people die without the neighbor knowing," he continues. In summary, Entre Patios proposes to live more in community because that closeness is also a way of protection. Children play on the playground and take care of each other. If someone breaks his ankle, it's easier for his neighbors to be on the lookout ... That kind of thing.

We did not invent anything. Children also play in community pools for conventional promotions. The difference is that we seek to create a culture of shared care, of attacking the isolation and loneliness of people, which is also a pandemic recognized by the WHO, ”says Alonso. A point: in 1968, Ricardo Bofill built the Walden building with a similar speech. Living together in the building was an ordeal from the beginning. “It is a matter of education, of people knowing what they are up to and of having a strict respect for the individual space. We cannot go from isolation to invasion. We have a facilitator, whose role is to create positive dynamics. "

What Alonso proposes is an extreme in the new normality of architecture: that of those who will seek protection in the community. " But I'm not kidding myself, I know that many people will want to live in more enclosed and more individualistic homes ."

There are known examples. Medellin. Urbanism and Society is a book by Jorge Pérez-Jaramillo (Turner, 2019) that tells, among other things, how the Colombian middle class went to live in bunker houses with their backs to the street due to drug trafficking violence. How not to understand it? “But the compact city, as a stage for integrated life, with inclusion and equity, with proximity urban planning and well-developed neighborhoods, linked to urban accessibility and mobility systems, with public spaces and quality social facilities ... that city is more current than ever . The city expanded in suburbs disintegrates and segregates, destroys the political and social fabric and, above all, destroys ecological structures, "says Pérez-Jaramillo.

The paradox is everywhere: in Paris, Mayor Hidalgo proposes a plan so that all residents have their needs covered in a 15-minute walk : schools, shops, outpatients ... In contrast, in the US, the coronavirus is interpreted as something that basically happens in dense New York. And in Spain, real estate consultants are already talking about an imminent oil raft effect .

"We all wonder the same thing, if cars will occupy the center of public space again," says Fermín Vázquez, founder of the b720 studio. "I am not very optimistic about the relationship that we are going to have with architecture from now on, but I hope that the landscape of the empty city will help us understand how aggressive the space in which we have been living was ."

How have our floors worked in the confinement? The normal ones, not the houses that appear in the magazines ... «We have realized that there is a great pressure in the houses from the inside out. We miss a terrace but then we remember that we had it and we closed it because at home we fit badly and we needed those square meters. As the street is aggressive, deep down, that terrace only served to leave the butane cylinder ... And, in addition, we knew that the apartment would sell better with the terrace closed. The real problem is that: housing is the great investment of our lives and we give it a value of exchange rather than use. We care more about being able to sell the house well than adapting it to our lives, ”answers Vázquez. « We are all conservative with housing , it is normal. But you have to take steps and break the vicious circle ».

Everything shrinks

For example: why does a middle-class Spanish family live more closely than in Germany or Austria? “In Austria, the standard says that rooms are a minimum of 14 square meters. Here, it is normal to find a room of 10 meters and two of eight for the children ”, explains the architect Zaida Muxí. "I'm Argentina. When friends from Latin America visit me, they are surprised at how small the houses are in Spain ».

And Muxí continues. «The spaces are hierarchical. The kitchen is separated from the living area, it is little more than an extended clothesline, so that the cook, who is usually the woman, is marginalized. Children are not thought of. The spaces are rigid and hierarchical. The rules do not allow experimentation and, in the few gaps that they leave, the market appears ».

“If we go to the example of Austria, the difference is that public housing has been done without speculating in space. In Vienna there are VPOs of 120 square meters. From there, the pressure of space does not exist », explains his colleague Daniel Mòdol, former councilor for Urban Planning in Barcelona. «I don't know what will happen to the house. I suppose there will be colivings, there will be more neo-rural people who return to the countryside, there will be more conservative people ... But I can already tell you that in two office projects we work on, clients already tell us to forget about open spaces. That they want compartmentalized rooms as they did before .

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