The dream of inhabiting

The dream of inhabiting

The house, besides becoming the main player in architecture for the first time in modern times, is both receptor and transmitter and particularly sensitive to subtle changes occurring every moment of this century.

The idea behind the text - "modern project, unfinished project" - part of current thinking that proclaims that any project announced in the mid-nineteenth century in the midst of the industrial revolution remains a current project today; current in the continuous movement between past and future and immersed in the tensions of the present. No doubt this unstable position of the modern project is the sign and condition of his own incessant renewal.

It is a journey of leaps through episodes that are scattered and arise from the modern dream of inhabiting. At the beginning, the Soane house in the light of Walter Benjamin's Passages is the interior that resists when faced by threatening outside modernity. The Glass Room by Mies Van der Rohe and the Parisian villas of artists of the 1920s are then presented as heroic embodiments of orthodox modernity. Later, the liberating explosion of the modern project will involve another expression with a broader, more complex and multifaceted vision, visible in the architects' homes as though they were autobiographic constructions. The critical review in the suburban house of the seventies is reflected in the work of two architects who converge and drift apart: Matta-Clark and Venturi.

In the end, the revolutionary, utopian or futuristic proposals of the sixties lead to a vision of the present, in which the new information and communication processes appear in the house as potential transformers and a continuation of the modern dream of inhabiting.