THE PASSAGE

The Passage

More than two decades ago, Robin Evan’s essay “ Figures, Doors and Passages” offered one of the clearest and most compelling arguments about “ the plan and its occupants”. The invention of the corridor as the primary organizational space of the domestic interior; he argues, did not simply mark a shift in architectural styles of conceptions of space. Instead, it indexed the reconfiguration of the family and social organization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Palladian villa, every room was linked to its neighbours through multiple doors. The occupants and visitors to the house would flow through sitting rooms, bedrooms and so on. The plan is one similar to the Indo-Portuguese houses seen earlier in this text. There was no separation between circulation and room, suggesting that ideas of privacy and intimacy were perhaps not what they are today. Evans demonstrated how the introduction of the corridor did not simply separate circulation from the rooms, but also how each room enjoyed only one access point to its connective spine.  The house, its spatial configuration and connectivity, was a diagram for a different concept of domesticity and intimacy based on moralities, social organisations and regimes of labour. While previously it would have been completely normal o walk through a child’s bedroom on the way to one’s own, the parental bed and the children’s room were now kept strictly apart. It is at this time, that “childhood” was invented as a discrete period in modern life, and bourgeois notions of romantic marriage took hold. Additionally, the corridor also spoke of efficiency. Before, the use of a room might have inhibited access ( through locked doors; now all such tensions are smoothed away via the passage. Moreover, this reading can be extended to suggest that it is not simply the house that responds to different social structures, but that these architectures also train their subjects. Unlike Heidegger’s notion of passive domestic domains, perhaps the house, as Mark Cousins has recently suggested,  is rather, a site of training , discipline and possibly aggression. In other words, one must learn how to live by becoming domesticated. The architectural concept of the corridor and its plan engages a subject who could not exist outside that space.  

         The following is the O House by Hideyuki Nakayama, located in Kyoto, which takes the form of a passage off of the main street. The program of the house is neatly tucked around corners of the large open 'corridor'. It is an experiment that challenges passer-by's to walk in...or walk by...

Chapter: Interface

CHAPTER: INTERFACE

Just after a fish-curry-and-rice dinner, the men in the family fill their small glasses with feni (the pungent, potent local cashew brew)and a dash of lemon soda before they walk out onto the balcão. It is the perfect time at dusk just after the swarms of mosquitoes have subsided for the night and before the village sinks into black darkness. A good time to enjoy the cool sea breeze rustling the coconut palms in the twilight after a long day. People stroll by in the lane, peer over the low compound walls, most of them family friends for generations. Each waves; some stop to gossip. 

The women stay inside; planning the next day’s meal.

...or perhaps...

“They would invariably start in the back-yard, some old disillusioned housewife crying foul over the neighbour's coconuts falling on her roof or their dog chasing her chickens. Then like a bad smell they would swirl through the house making their way to the balcão and in this swirling movement they would gather force like a tsunami and capture everyone in their vicinity including the men of the household who would elect themselves as Generals of the battle and little children who would enlist as foot-soldiers. The women would hitch their kapod unto their waist, the men would stand up-right in the balcão with a dando club for effect and the children would run about frantically not knowing really what was going on except that there was a fight raging with their neighbours and that for the next month at least they wouldn't be allowed to play with the neighbour's children.The women like dervishes would gain momentum in this cross-fire exchange of verbal vitriol making sure to bring to light every titbit of information that had been gleaned from various sources which was usually the neighbour's maid, such as the night Padre Vicar paid a visit while the man of the house was away and stayed long enough to sample those delectable bolinas the wife had made just that afternoon. The men of the house would interject into this fray frequently with foul obscenities usually calling into question each other's legitimacy. These fights would go on for hours on end until twilight would gently peep through the evening sky and the neighbouring audience watching in mute fascination would tire and close their thick, ant-eaten wooden windows.”

The relationship between the street and the house in Goa plays a lively role in orchestrating social dynamics. A simple road trip around Goa’s villages will familiarize you with 18th-20th century Indo-Portuguese houses where visitors are warmly greeted at the gate and ushered down the narrow lane to the entrance of ancestral family homes. The journey from the front gate to the front door is clearly defined, establishing a distinctively Goan pattern of public and private realms. At the front of the house is the feature that distinguishes the Goan house, the sopo or bolkanv (called so after the arrival of the Portuguese from the Portuguese word balcão), a balcony, a stalled and columned porch. The curved plan of seats in the balcão, its quasi-Tuscan capitals, shafts of cypris columns and swan necked volutes in the pediment were all Latin influences introduced in the houses where the notion of space, areas of transition and use of outdoor spaces still remained traditionally Indian. The interstitial space between the gate and the elevated veranda of the house, it is designed to be a place to “see and be seen”. The built-in seating on the balcão becomes an inviting place of gathering; a place to stay. The balcãos of Goa bring to attention the transition between the dwelling place and the city which is often lost in the front yards of the single-family homes in suburban North America today.

Before India’s exposure to the Latin lifestyle, the traditional Goan house consisted of small chambers which fit closely around the raaj agnonn, an open courtyard. To its front was the osro, a hall for guests, to its rear was the vasri, the dining hall, and to its sides, the kuddi, or the living rooms. In order to analyse the transformations in the house of the Christian Goan(referred to as the Catholic House) it’s important to take a brief look at the typical form of the Hindu household (referred to as the Hindu House). The essence of the Hindu House is the symmetrically balanced square plan, symbolic in local mythology of the four corners of the world which are assumed to be dominated by Agni the God of Fire. The flexible nature of both interior and exterior spaces of the house and the Hindu lifestyle reflects a world where concerns of privacy was not considered important. The courtyard is drenched in rain or stands dry according to the weather, sleeping areas became work rooms during the day, and the entrance porch welcomes visitors in the evenings. There is no prescribed name given to each room - no library, study, dining nor living area. The only exception to this rule applies to the preparation of food and sacred space -- the kitchen and the pooja room. The house is alive with activity -- children play noisily in corridors, women anxiously complete their chores in the passages -- no area is wasted, no room is owned. The benefits of these multifunctional spaces are strengthened by the absence of large ostentatious furniture in the Hindu lifestyle -- chairs and tables are replaced by mats, patts or baithaks.The courtyard is the interface between the public and the service areas and is used by the women of the household almost exclusively, whether it be washing laundry or decorating the ground with coloured powders. The entrance of the house is mainly used by the men of the house while the women are confined to the inner sanctum. Rudimentary and functional in nature, the Hindu houses, marked with minimal ornamentation, are introverted living areas which are moulded from the inside as a series of undefined rooms that transform in character according to use. 

The Catholic house embodies the culture of the Europeans in both letter and spirit and this encompasses every aspect of their lives including the way they build their houses. The idea of individual privacy and space allocation for various purposes is a Western concept and it is clear that this foreign intervention was adopted by the Goans from the Portuguese. The simplest form of the Goan house is an outward-looking linear form with no conscious segregation between the sexes, but rather between the family and the service. The balcão at the front of the house leads to a hall that spans the entire width of the house, with a series of two rooms located abreast, to follow. The balcão is where the extended family spent a good portion of their time and became a focal point for the whole household to greet regular visitors. The sala, rather like the Victorian parlour, is reserved for formal introductions. The bedrooms are joined by a a wide passageway that holds the family altar, while the kitchen is located at the end of the house and is adjoined by servants’ quarters. 

Very much like the Western attitude towards privacy, the hierarchy of private space in the Catholic house was determined by the distance from the public street. Dean D’Cruz, a native Goan architect, says: “The key aspect of traditional Goan architecture is its scale and relationship to the streetscape. The front of the building facing the road, being the most important, is treated with formality. However as one moves through the house, spaces and rear elevations start becoming much more informal.” Other forms of the Catholic house adopted the notion of “wings” and annexes which would provide the family with private rooms and semi-public areas which are separated from the main hall and the service areas. The basic I-shaped form grew to become an H-shaped form when each generation in the house wanted to make their own distinguishable contribution to the house therefore introducing two salas on either side of the entrance. By the middle of the 18th century, Goans had built houses with two levels in imitation of the Europeans , following the tendency of the Western cultures to split the house and elevate its private zones. The local lifestyle, however, did not easily adapt to the scheme and both ceremonial and living rooms alongside the bedrooms occupied the top floor, while the lower level remained empty, becoming merely a token of family grandeur. 

Catholic Goan houses are a product of two very distinct cultures, with radically different attitudes toward privacy and community. Unlike the Europeans, Indians live in a hot, humid climate, in a world of proximity, in a house with fourteen around a dining table with a bevy of servants and few locked doors. They adopted a new culture, and while adapting to it, something remarkable happened -- a most bizarre lexicon of architectural elements was developed, one that was distinct and only theirs.

ONE WEEK

The foolishness of stubbornly sticking to comfortable rules instead for preparing for a rapidly evident change in domesticity is best represented in Buster Keaton’s 23-minute 1920s movie One Week. A story of a young couple’s tremendous faith in putting up a prefabricated house with all the right parts but the wrong directions only to result in a hopeless series of deconstructive and dynamic forms that are uninhabitable. The caricature of the conventional house represented by Keaton’s outrage persistently attempts to negate any possibly unified or totalizing image. A cruel metaphor of the stagnant nature of the single family house, it begs to question our idea of what a house should look like and of whether we no longer need the “parts and patterns” we prescribe a house should have. The conventional use of each architectural element of the house- a wall, a roof, a floor, a window and a door- is reversed and at times , omitted, thus allowing the space of the house to become a playing field of new possibilities. 

CANADIAN FAMILIES

THESIS MARKET

The Changing Faces of Toronto. With a drastic demographic shift on the horizon , will our diversity remain a badge or become a burden? by Joe Friesen

From Saturday's Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Mar. 12, 2010 8:59PM ESTLast updated on Saturday, Mar. 13, 2010 3:19AM EST

Toronto once used vagrancy laws to harass Italian immigrants who wanted to stand outdoors and chat. It balked at sidewalk cafés and erected signs that said “No dogs or Jews allowed on the beach.”It was known as the Belfast of Canada, a place where the Orange Order and the Anglo-Saxon establishment reigned supreme.But repressive, staid, boring Toronto is in the midst of a stunning transformation. Today, people from all corners of the globe live side by side. They compete for jobs and space and influence. And the city hums along with a minimum of fuss. But there are those who warn that all may not be as we hope. They talk of troubling signs. There are neighbourhoods – ethnic enclaves – where immigrants need never learn to speak English or French, where they could live entire lives and rarely encounter someone from outside their ethnic group, the doubters say.The economic downturn has so far been relatively mild, but recessions often lead to tension over immigration. If things fall apart, will the city's motto, “Diversity our strength,” hold true?

THE FIRST GENERATION.Toronto opened its arms to Raj Jhajj on the day he immigrated in 1991 and embraced him with the half-hearted enthusiasm of a city that had been through this before. The young man from the polluted, industrial heart of the Indian Punjab had only eight dollars in his pocket and, predictably, a dream of a better life.He had worked as a tool-and-die maker in India, a highly specialized manufacturing skill, but Toronto was wary. It was the height of the recession and hard for anyone to find work, let alone an immigrant stymied by the Catch-22 of having no Canadian experience. Toronto accommodated him among the South Asian diaspora on its western edge. He drove a cab. He worked lonely shifts as a security guard. He struggled. He survived.Four years into his Canadian sojourn, Toronto succumbed and offered him the job he dreamed of, working as a machinist at the Chrysler plant in Brampton. It gave him the stability to settle down and start a family. He's since taken an undergraduate and graduate degree by distance education. At 45, he's a pillar of his community who raised thousands of dollars for a new hospital and pressured governments to get it built. He's active in politics and narrowly missed winning a federal Liberal nomination.When he thinks of what he left behind, he can only chuckle at the luxurious lives his children lead.“I was living in poverty that was like hell,” he said. “I used to beg to eat. These guys, I have to force them to eat.”Now he almost takes for granted that his children will go to university, graduate to a profession and join the establishment.But if there's one thing that nags at Mr. Jhajj, it's the concern that his children aren't getting the full Canadian experience. When they moved into their Brampton neighbourhood, the area was what he calls “mainstream,” a more or less representative mix of the Canadian mosaic. But over the last dozen years, the mainstream has moved out, he said, and now the street is almost entirely South Asian. It brings many advantages, he said, but he'd prefer to see the visible minority population distributed more evenly across the country.“I think it bothers others Canadians, which I can feel,” he said. “I want to see a Canadian city as a Canadian city where people are all together. … If Brampton keeps going this way we won't see the difference between living in Brampton and living in Asia, and that I don't like.”

ESTABLISHING COMMUNITIES.Ethnic enclaves have been a part of Toronto's history from the outset, and they've always been a source of worry for the Anglo establishment. Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney makes a regular point of discussing the need to ensure that Canada doesn't become a country of ethnic silos or parallel communities. The first large group of ethnic immigrants to establish themselves in Toronto were the Jews, who lived in the Ward neighbourhood that centred roughly on present-day City Hall. Ryerson professor Myer Siemiatycki said the Ward, which was demolished to make way for downtown, was typically treated as a grave threat to the norms of the city and condemned as a slum.The Italians who established themselves on College Street were treated with the same suspicion. As were the Chinese in Chinatown. Today, those former ethnic enclaves are celebrated as colourful, desirable parts of the city.“It shows how the concerns of the past fade,” said University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz. “People who were foreigners or strangers are now ‘us,' and that makes you optimistic that those arriving today will down the road be considered ‘us' and we'll look at the enclaves, the Chinese, the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, the way we now look at the Italian enclaves or the Jewish enclaves, as just historic remnants of immigration history.”As Prof. Reitz argues, there are sound reasons for communities to agglomerate in a certain area. There's comfort to be had among those who can easily understand one's language and experience, and there's also the ease of finding places of worship and familiar goods for sale.“The settlement of new immigrants is vastly facilitated by the presence of ethnic communities that perform all sorts of social-service functions which if they didn't exist would fall to governments to provide,” Prof. Reitz said. “This is really private citizens solving public-policy problems through market behaviour.”

THE INCOME DILEMMA.The market poses other policy problems, however, that bode ill for the Toronto of 2031.Don Drummond, chief economist at TD Bank, said the evidence is overwhelming that recent immigrants are not integrating into the labour market as well as their predecessors.“Within five years [of arrival] immigrants used to make more than the Canadian-born, and every generation of immigrants used to make more than the previous one. Since 1981, all of that stuff is just falling further and further away,” Mr. Drummond said. “Immigrants are never catching up to Canadian earnings … even though they're better educated.”What changed over that period is that, with the end of racial discrimination in immigration policy in the late 1960s, Asia became far and away the largest source of immigrants. Roughly 75 to 80 per cent of immigrants over that period were visible minorities.

THE SECOND GENERATION. Even the children of more recent immigrants, who in some cases outperform the Canadian-born in school and are more likely to go on to post-secondary education, also lagged the Canadian-born in earnings in one study led by Mr. Drummond.“You hate to say it's racism. You could say maybe they don't have the context other people have. But yeah, it's certainly there as a possible explanation,” he said.Prof. Siemiatycki also underlines the challenge of ensuring the second generation has a platform to prosperity.“Immigrants expect to encounter adversity. They tend to be very forgiving of the host society,” he said. “With the second generation, legitimately, they will be less forgiving than their parents. They were born here. They went to school here. They have every reason to believe they're full and equal Canadians. When their experience suggests otherwise, they will have a bigger fall than their parents.”A little more than a quarter of Toronto's population will be second-generation Canadians in 2031, and about half will be first generation (meaning they were born elsewhere), according to Statscan predictions.

THE NEW DIFFICULTY: BLENDING IN.What's different for the present wave of immigrants, as opposed to earlier generations, is that they and their children may not blend in as easily as “Canadians” even years after their arrival, or years after being born in Canada. The issue of race, raised by the very fact that counting visible minorities is considered a job for the national statistics agency, may be ever present in their lives.Shabnum Budhwani, an Indo-Canadian mother of two who immigrated a little more than a decade ago, likes the fact that visible minorities are counted, but she hates the term.“First, it refers to your colour. You're being referred to by your skin, instead of as a person. Second, you're a minority … so it creates a suggestion that there are two kinds of Canadians.”Her daughters, both university students, consider themselves entirely Canadian. The same is true for Mr. Jhajj's kids, who are still in the public-school system, which Mr. Jhajj raves about as the best aspect of life in Canada.Many experts say that the ties of tolerance and understanding that Toronto has more or less successfully nurtured are forged in the city's schools and on its playing fields.

COPING WITH BACKLASH.However, Mr. Jhajj said he worries though that, should the Canadian economy get considerably worse, there will be a backlash against visible minorities, whether they're immigrants or long-time Canadians.“As long as Canada is growing there won't be problems with immigration. As soon as we run into economic problems, people will be looking for scapegoats,” he said. From time to time, moments of tension arise. There were the attacks on Asian fishermen north of Toronto, and allegations of racial profiling of blacks by Toronto police. But polls show that Canadians are still very favourably disposed toward high levels of immigration and the agitation over Muslim dress has so far been largely contained to Quebec. On the question of how Toronto is coping so far, Prof. Siemiatycki sums it up as a series of successes and warning signs.

“In terms of day-to-day life, this is a very civil, harmonious and diverse city. The number of daily exchanges that cross boundaries of race, language, religion, nationality, et cetera, are nothing short of extraordinary,” he said. “In an age of border crossings, the world needs examples of cities that can make it work.”

WORK-PLAN

FAMILIAR FORMS

VitraHaus, Completion: 2009

Herzog & de Meuron

The "VitraHaus" is a direct architectural rendition of the ur-type of house, as found in the immediate vicinity of Vitra. By stacking, extruding and pressing simply shaped houses become complex configurations in space, where outside and inside merge. The interior is designed as a spatial sequence with suprising transitions and views of the landscape. 

Tokyo Apartment, Sou Fujimoto 2006-2009

The communal housing built in a residential area in the center of Tokyo consists of five dwelling units, including the owner's. Each unit consists of two or three independent rooms in pro typical "house" shapes, which are separated and located on several floors, connected by exterior stairs. Each dwelling unit is realized by the experience of linking two rooms and the city when passing along the outside. It is a collective housing that represents  "A tokyo that never exists (which) is made into a form intended to make an infinitely rich place that is crowded and disorderly"- Sou Fujimoto

Copyright for all Herzgog Images: Iwan Baan

Copyright for All SouFujimoto Images: Sou Fujimoto

Chapter: Methods of Approach

METHODS OF REPRESENTATION

Tom Ngo. A toronto-based artist who works on representing the "apsurd" in the house. Common sense and conventional practice prohibits the evolution of architecture. Through reproducing past models for efficiency and economy, routine thinking preserves the flaws of the standard model. Using different frameworks of thought, architects can create new solutions, which rectify the faults of the norm, and distance themselves from making habitual design decisions. “These drawings are created through fracturing rules of concept/design and then obeying them ad absurdum,” says Ngo. “The result is a nutty and whimsical brand of social commentary.”

1. Namby Pamby.“The repetition of word endings in nonsense poetry creates phonetically appealing words to pronounce. Phrases like Humpty Dumpy and Hey Diddle Diddle are examples of this nonsensical operation. Namby Pamby is an attempt to translate the operation into form.”

2. No Other Way. “A dream house for a meat grinder collector. The above building is constructed of four like facades presenting him a new home every time he arrives by balloon. The structure below is a mental retreat from his constantly changing everyday”

3. Ghost Town Precious. “This construction combines the themes of permanence and the ephemeral. Shoddily constructed with hints of integrity, the structure has a ghost-town quality”

4. The Swing Set Houses. “A pair of houses are attached to a large swing-set structure. The houses share a communal circulation core and next door is an individual swing for one person”

All Images and Text: http://www.tomngo.net/

On John Hejduk

"Architects are organically responsible today to have their language run parallel with their structure...I cannot do a building without building a repertoire of characters, of stories, of language, it's all parrallel.
It's not just building per se. It's building worlds." 
 -John Hejduk in 'Conversation between John Hejduk and David Shapiro: The Architect who Drew Angels' 


GOOD NEIGHBOR HOUSE (1975)
"It is about black and white in a philosophical sense. It is about paranoia, distrust, voyeurism... peeping over the wall"






Between the houses stands a high wall that the occupants can watch each other through a spyhole and a periscope. What is most fascinating about this project is that the facade , which is most often used as tool to enclose and to conceal, is the only instrument which is used to create maximum tension between private and public.  The occupants of the Good Neighbor House lives a very visible life. Hejduk's anticipatory approach to architecture is meant to cause astonishment, to amuse. 




All pictures copyright © Liao Yusheng : http://figure-ground.com/wallhouse/