Design research on Temporary Homes

Elena Enrica Giunta, Agnese Rebaglio

Design research on Temporary Homes

Hospitable Places for Homeless, Immigrants and Refugees

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Cover Image:

Front Cover, The Free scenario, 2013 © Elena E.Giunta

Elena Enrica Giunta, Agnese Rebaglio

Design research on Temporary Homes

Hospitable Places for Homeless, Immigrants and Refugees

© Copyright 2014 by Authors and Spurbuchverlag

ISBN 978-3-88778-444-7

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Nicola Rainisio

“These places do not understand us.” Environmental Psychology of the Refugee Centres p. 72

Manuela Celi,

Simone Fanciullacci,

Chiara Moreschi

Cosy objects: instant products for the reorganization of spaces and functionp.90

Luciano Crespi

Prelude: New rituals of contemporary inhabitingp.9

Agnese Rebaglio,

Elena E. Giunta

DeCA research: theoretical framework p.13

Elena E. Giunta

‘Ithaca’ in the Globalized erap.32

Agnese Rebaglio

Designing for temporary, collective, cross-cultural hospitable placesp.20

Agnese Rebaglio,

Daniela Petrillo

Defining scenario for a new perspective about reception sites p.52

Elena Caratti

Communication Design for Refugee Women. A research project for the Sammartini Polyfunctional Centre in Milanp. 104

References p.133

Creditsp. 140

Giulia Gerosa,

Elena E. Giunta

Design for hospitable interiors: open-ended design solution for welcoming diversityp. 118

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Prelude: New rituals

of contemporary inhabiting

Luciano CrespiI

The highly topical subject of this book raises a question. Hospitality towards

refugees is one specific and important responsibility in the broader context of public

policies framed to support ‘fragile’ categories of users. But to what extent does it

stand on its own when evaluating possible solutions regarding the nature and

quality of the environments to be created for reception of refugees? Or, to be more

specific, can the needs of political refugees influence the design culture to such an

extent that they become regarded as a theme with its own characteristics and not

part of the more general question of new modes of inhabiting public property in the

contemporary world?

To attempt to answer this we must isolate some aspects of the subject itself. First of

all, it should be emphasized that we are referring to furnished housing designed for

a population with no income and who are to be accommodated for a limited time.

This is the most delicate aspect, but it also represents the most exciting challenge for

the designers, as it forces us to think about ways of inclusion not so much on a

I Full Professor of the Design School, Politecnico di Milano, DESIGN Dept. Coordinator of the Interior Design

Course and of the Urban Interior design Master.

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neighbourhood scale, as is generally the case, as at the level of the so-called ‘primary’

space, i.e. the environments that serve as repositories of the rituals of daily life. This

also has applications for other types of users who, in greater metropolitan

concentrations, represent a large segment of the demand for public housing:

unemployed youth, non-resident students with no income, separated parents with

children, migrants, elderly people living alone, and so on – a population which, if

we exclude the economic condition it shares in common, is characterised by vastly

different cultures, lifestyles and religious beliefs. The status of political refugee adds

to all this the suffering caused by violent and forced uprooting from the place of

origin, experiences which dictate that they receive special attention (as is clearly

brought out by contributions from other disciplines in this collection).

The twin risks the project runs in these cases is to overrate the peculiarity of a

specific family of users (the corollaries of which impact mostly on areas outside its

own sphere of competence, such as management and social inclusion), and to

generalise and typify them and in that light to seek standard solutions. I am put in

mind of a very readable short essay written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, entitled “The

Philosophy of Furniture”, which is rich in both witty observations and obvious

generalisations, such as the ways in which the different populations of the world

like to furnish their homes, e.g. that Italians excel in colour and marble, the Spanish

in curtains and the English in garden furniture.II Typification, standardisation and

following rules to the letter were the obsession of the last century, reaching a point

of crisis when first the existence and then the value of ‘diversity’ began to be

acknowledged. The clearest note of warning on the subject has been sounded by art

critic Nicolas Bourriaud: “What postmodernism calls hybridisation involves grafting

onto the trunk of a popular culture that which has become uniform markers of

‘specificity’ – features, usually caricatured, of a distinctive ethnic, national, or other

cultural identity”.III This, according to Bourriaud, must be resisted by deploying the

cultural model of creolisation, a process elucidated by Antillean writer Édouard

Glissant, which represents a new way of understanding cultural identity at a time

when globalisation is steadily pursuing its uprooting agenda. Creolisation is

II Cf.Edgar Allan Poe, Cf.Edgar Allan Poe, Cf.Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Furniture, Palermo: Torri del Vento, 2011.

III Nicolas Bourriaud, Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009, p.20.

0. Prelude: New rituals of contemporary inhabiting

11

achieved not by setting one fixed root against another, “a mythologised ‘origin’

against an integrating and homogenizing ‘soil’”,IV but by laying the foundations for

a radicantV art, which acknowledges the emerging presence of the immigrant, the

exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer as the dominant figures of contemporary

culture and recognises “the inhabitant par excellence of this imagination of spatial

precariousness as an expert in shedding his affinities”VI. The purpose is to set in

motion “circuits and experimentations” rather than permanent systems and

installations, to be established between “the identity and the learning of the Other”.

In addition to its documentation and research, the book describes three different

possible ‘environmental’ scenarios, three different perspectives, in an attempt to

give character to the places, preserving also their diversities. This represents an

important and original contribution, regarding which we may add two

considerations.

The first concerns changes in the rituals regarding how the house is used, and the

symbolic meaning that these rituals take on in different cultures. This concept of

rituals is best described by Carla Pasquinelli in her book La vertigine dell’ordine,VII

which views the furnishing of a home as “a cosmogonic act” geared to establishing

an order capable of regulating the lives of its inhabitants. At the same time, however,

it reveals the irreversibility of the process of the “slow desecration of space” and its

“polysemic multiplication”, which the idea of home strives to resist through the

adoption by its inhabitants of various stratagems. Therefore, just as the field of

contemporary art is regarded by artists primarily as a storehouse full of materials to

be manipulated, rather than an opportunity to “embark on the heroic quest for the

unexplored and the sublime”, so that of the designing of spaces dedicated to

accommodating these “modern-day nomads” should be capable of abandoning all

nomenclatures, rules and spatial types associated with rituals that no longer exist,

and replace them with culture strategies such as those outlined in the text. I would

IV Ibid., p.21.

V To Bourriaud the radicant was an “organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances”, and

therefore to be radicant means “translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors” (ibid., p.22).

VI Ibid., p.51.

VII Carla Pasquinelli, La vertigine dell’ordine: Il rapporto tra sé e la casa. Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2004.

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add, however, that we must not overlook the most authoritative and innovative

experiences in this particular sphere of design, those of Castiglioni, Sottsass,

Mendini, Joe Colombo, etc., onto which fragments from the context may be grafted.

Here flexibility is only relevant to a certain degree. More than sliding panels or other

devices that have been introduced experimentally a thousand times and with poor

results, we need to study how art today creates worlds, just as a DJ or a web surfer

does, and allow users themselves the opportunity to contribute to the act of

furnishing, thus helping to create a sense of belonging. We might describe this as a

sort of design of the ‘unfinished’, to be completed with the aid of the world of ‘little

things’, the philosophy of which Francesca Rigotti has illustrated so excellentlyVIII.

The second consideration regards the question of size. Clearly, since we are dealing

with the no-fee (or nearly so) public sector, the choice should be geared towards

low-cost housing and, therefore, a reduced floor area per inhabitant. Here, however,

we must completely revise the concept of existenz minimum developed by the

Modernist Movement, and replace it with that advocated by Alessandro Mendini,

i.e. the existenz maximumIX - a space which, even when resources are scarce, is still

capable of expressing the symbolic values and sensory qualities that help make a

place hospitable, through the use of interior design’s own means: materials, light

and colour. Recent experiences such as the experiments carried out by Philippe

Rahm on the ‘meteorological’ character of spaces, and others not so recent, such as

those of Ugo la Pietra dealing with the disequilibrating character of space and the

breaking down of the boundary between private and public and interior and

exterior, force interior design to explore more profoundly the theme of the

relationship between man and space.

VIII Cf. Francesca Rigotti, Nuova filosofia delle piccole cose, Novara: Interlinea, 2013.

IX Cf. Alessandro Mendini (ed.), Existenz maximum: giovani presenze del design fra i mistico e lo spaziale,

Florence: Tipolito Press 80, 1990.