Residences.. A house’s present is an extension of its past, as well as a prediction of its future, showing the resistance of everyday habits to the passing of time. The modernist house was the last residential revolution, and the models that developed from it on both sides of the Atlantic have not lost their clairvoyance; nor have domestic projects ceased to consider themselves a testing ground for other types of buildings: forms on an intimate scale have been known to transform themselves in order to reach the public dimension.

Luis Fernández-Galiano
Fictitious Futures
Richard Ingersoll
Neutra: The Tent and the Cave
Antonio Armesto
Sostres: Familiar Myths
Luis Fernández-Galiano
OMA and H&dM, Living Forms

Luis Fernández-Galiano 
Residences

Electronic mail has not altogether supplanted postal mail, and the address on the web has not replaced the address in the city. Physical bodies cannot yet inhabit virtual spaces, no matter how much the new kinetic elites aspire to the same incorporeal circulation today enjoyed by information or money, in permanent transit through the tangled networks of a world of flows. Although some may fantasize about the insomniac roving of frequent flyers that commute between hotels and respond to the cellphone with warnings of its changing position on the planet, the most recurrent dream still refers to a place in the world, preferably in the form of a domestic fiction. Some of the most recent are presented in this issue, devoutly grouped under an archaic title – the Spanish ‘domicilios’ – borrowed from a collection of short stories by the writer and journalist Vicente Verdú.

If these signature houses are addresses, they are so, above all, of domestic dreams. because in them resides the capacity of architecture to feed the promise of a better life. Nowadays nevertheless, this promise is to a large degree fictitious: the fantasies that dwell in the house are in ironic contradiction with the impressive multiplication of residential projects that consume territory in the manner of an implacable metastasis, devastating at once the illusion of a rustic paradise and the elusive myth of the individual house. A dream turned into a nightmare, these choral complexes of residences orchestrated in dispersed order feign the same autonomous personality as the swarm of motorized molecules that moves toward them in the form of automobiles, and whose Brownian motion appears as random in its minute details as it is predictable in its general pattern..

Statistical like the laws of gases, the uncontrolled sprawl of the urban fabric refutes the organic predictions which augured that cities would stretch with the anatomical logic of articulated structures, and clamorously dissolves all illusory hopes of each individual cell having a voice and purpose of its own. The dense scheme of the compact city thus liquefies its texture in a residential pulp that spills over the territory, reaching every nook and cranny and drowning in its viscous substance the deceptive fiction of the singular house, segregated and stupid like the elementary particles described by the French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq. The material address outlives the virtual one just as the postal address does the electronic, but both sink in the same ocean of garbage that buries as much the physical universe of the landscape as the immaterial universe of communication..