Everyday, Popular Matters

“We know how to provide a ‘thin description’ of an entity’s idealized material aspects, yet we are finally starting to learn how to give a post hoc narrative thick description of what should have been visible in the gathering that brings a thing together.”

— Bruno Latour

Architects are responding to a world that suffers from overbuilding, yet millions remain homeless and lack rudimentary infrastructure. Contemporary practices are looking at the built environment as the site for material exchange, recognizing the material and ecological limits of growth. As a way of reevaluating material practices, they particularly focus on methods for cataloguing and redistributing end-of-life salvage building components. Though they present a transformation, they negate the histories of material objects by placing them into a unitized system, and therefore remain only tangential to architecture. Can we think of material reuse in more expansive ways that integrate heritage, people, labor, memories, knowledge, economies of production, and domestic acts?

This thesis looks at popular architecture as subject matter, analyzing a type of architecture that is built from conditions of austerity. Through individual and collective actions, popular architecture has created an alternative response to housing needs, connecting urban realities through the self-management of territorial, cultural, and material resources. In constant flux, these practices are inherently political and sustainable. The project of this thesis begins at cataloguing and building a collection of fragments, memories, and forms of knowledge of the house on Paseo Bolivar #39-25, Cartagena, Colombia. Creating a historical account of all the ‘architectural’ material of the house to expand the record of contributors, geographies, and socio-political contexts.

To imagine the proposal for the next life cycle of the house, the thesis Everyday, Popular, Matters is interested in valuing all its past lives with an equivalent gaze, where no one version prevails over the others, a work of metamorphosis that modifies what is found based on the intrinsic strength of the existing. Showing the presence of the past on the material of the present results in a building as a palimpsest that occupies more than just its physical space.

In the search of an expanded definition for material reuse, this thesis considers four conditions: construction techniques, extractive processes, cultural practices, and craft technologies. Adaptable concrete, wood, and steel structures define the construction techniques, allowing for both permanent and temporary inhabitations of the house. Cast concrete blocks and hollow clay bricks manifest extractive processes, conforming the enclosures and boundaries of the house to encapsulate memories and preserve the passage of time. Encaustic cement tiles represent cultural practices, revealing domestic acts and unearthing the layered stories and contested meanings embedded in their design and fabrication. Meanwhile, textile canopies and woven patterned rugs express craft technologies, anchoring the house to its cultural context by representing the permanence of artisanal practices. The collection of these techniques evidences material resources beyond their generic qualities.

This thesis assembles all the material entities involved in the making of a house, integrating vastness into itself without spatial reproduction. Embedded in the neoliberal economic model of vapid late consumerist emptiness, architecture can develop a strategy towards material reuse that considers the histories and memories of material objects. Accepting the accumulation of histories found in an existing building is a discipline, it enables a profound transformation for their meaning and performance to occur.

Physical Model - Adaptable Structure, Materials, Memories

Photograph - physical model — Physical Model - Ephemera

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Kelly Dix Van