Since modernist times every architect seems to feel oblilged to design the ideal house. But is there such a thing as ideal place? Given the increase in the number of times we move these days (from 2.2 times per person per lifetime in 1950 to 7.8 in 1994) the feeling that a house is a temporary place to stay increases with it. The house has become part of our "dwelling-career" with the longing for diversity seemingly paramount: everyone should have lived in a loft at one time, in a house on the lake, in a squat, a bungalow, a commune, alone, with kids... The demand for a greater variety and even more extreme dwelling forms is gaining momentum. The ideal home doesn't exist anymore, there are thousands of ideal homes. The permanent ideal has been supplanted by the temporary.
It seems as though we buy homes instead of houses, rather than making them by ourselves.
This opens up unprecedented opportunities for the role played by home catalogues. The cultivation of a maximum choice of housing types fulfils the wishes of the potential client and covers the uncertainties of the market. This extension of the known ideals can be set up through a series of extended or extrapolated "permutations" of the average house: This would lead from the straightforward front to back type to the stair type, the house with the superwindow, the house with no roof, the house with the towers, the disconected house, etcetera. All specific and characteristic spaces that wait to be inhabited, to be urbanized, to be appropriated, time and again. The housing block can be constructed as a Chinese puzzle of these ideals. But the placement of these ideals within the building envelope causes in-between houses with even more unexpected spaces and qualities. Is unexpectedness not the sublime goal of one's "dwelling career"?
MVRDV, "Proximity"
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