On "Villas", Suburbia and Collective Housing


architects njiric+
project "....this familiar feeling" - Mini Housing Project, Zagreb, Croatia
written by Feđa Vukić

 

Some forty years ago, Reyner Banham claimed “a home is not a house”, i.e. – “it does not have to be a house to be a home”, in free, but for his intentions quite appropriate, translation. This thesis opened room for discussion on the idea of dwelling which, like in the case of the Dymaxion house, conceptually analyzed the traditional position of bourgeois tectonicism, replacing it with a vision of a completely flexible system in which the housing forms are analogue to any mass product, such as cars. In 1960es, this was the motive  for architectural critiques on the trail of youth sub-cultural movements, but today, what kind of relevance a thesis like this can have, and the one which on top of it is applied on the very edge of that same modernization which, by neo-liberal forms of economic exchange, already replaced the then Ford-like models of linear production?