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MAEL DUCLOVEL – BUILDING WITH CONFLICTS [sample of students’ work]

LINK TO FULL BOOK

A. CONTEXT :

Looking at a small amount of ground left by the moles doing subterranean galleries.

B. SITUATION : A praise to the moles

Moles are fighters, everlasting fighters with a disruptive sense of the limits ! Indeed by their galleries they always reorganise pushing back the ground both horizontally and vertically. We should praise them cause they are showing us what can be a form that is determined by the nerverending construction of its own limits… Praise the moles for their conceptual work and their everyday conflict with the ground limits !

***

What if Restorative Justice is not relegated to specific organised moments in ad-hoc designed spaces (peacemaking rooms and restorative justice centres) but its principles were to invest the whole life of a community, both its overarching agenda and philosophy and its daily practices? This is the challenge of Mael’s project, that aims to become a platform for the sometimes-exhausting process of community building based on continuous negotiation among its members, both humans and non-humans, and between them and the built space.

Mael’s project steams from the awareness that modernity has organised and categorised the world according to utilitarian values. In the countryside, places, animals, humans, and technologies are associated with ideas of value creation. So, for instance, trees are not trees anymore but potential logs. This similar process can be observed with human beings, and the categorisation that is proper of carceral institutions of any sort. Against the paradigm of categorisation, Mael endorses arguments in favour of relational thinking so to conceive human beings not as a separate category – then also categorised within it – but always in a vital strict relation with non-human animals, plants, and the environment in general. Relations and the creation of open and inclusive community is an exciting project, that, however, is not harmless and can lead to oppositions, conflicts, if not dangerous outcomes. The project, hence, liberate architectural imagination to question the notion of limit and test possible cross-overs and cooperations – which also integrate recurrent possibility of conflict – beyond the determinations assigned to humans, non-humans, non-animals and technologies.

Mael’ project crosses three main different scales focusing on the design of three specific elements: the storage, the glasshouse, the fields.

The storage is a collective space – a space of compromise – where humans (the 13 members of the farm) and non-humans (the bats) are asked to deal with their co-presence. It has the role to kickstart the community – and eventually to become a fixed recurrent collective activity for it – whose climax is the ritualistic practices organised around the collection of the guano, the bats’ leftovers.

The glasshouse is adapted to host housing and working facilities. Mael’s starting point is the negotiation of everyday life, which is a feature of any commune and in this project also strictly related to the spatial and environmental qualities of the glasshouse. Living in a glasshouse can indeed be tough, for it is very cold in winter and very hot in summer. It requires great adaptability and continuous changes to protect the inside from the sun or from the cold, which the 13 inhabitants asked to perform daily and according to seasonal changes.

The role of the architect is limited, in Mael’s project, to the design of few devices (like curtain layers and stoves) that the community needs to activate everyday depending on the seasons and the climatic desires of the group. Hence climate technologies are not seen as perfect separated entities, but are rather re-discussed and re-organised. The architect is not seen here as a demiurge aiming to create a perfect harmony between inhabitants, but has the only role to raise possible situations which will lead to negotiations, oppositions, discussions, changes on housing management and on ways in which the space can be inhabit. Not only decisions about the glasshouse microclimate must be negotiated, but also those regarding use of space and internal movement. The inhabitants live in rooms organised according to a matrix, where doors are shared and negotiable. The collective living space – the kitchens but also the bathroom – are subject to negotiable rules of use.

***

A. CONTEXT :

Seven in the afternoon, during winter Anna is ready to put her jacket on her to get outside the bedroom. 

B. SITUATION :  

– Where are you going ? 

– In the kitchen, I think Paul needs a bottle of milk. 

– Ok, but can’t you go through the door of Marc ? 

– I don’t think so. Yesterday he was pretty upset when I knocked at his door to pass by. 

– Maybe you could just check if the door after the closet is opened, we agree on this last week to say if the path was okay or not .

– I looked and it was closed ! 

– Ok maybe he is doing his own stuff then… 

***

The third scale of design is that of the fields, where Mael envisions an agricultural project that can be transformed and rediscussed while it is processing. The community that he envisions does not have a precise productive agenda from the start, but engages in activities – tree-nursery and ewe-farming – that are interconnected with each other, that will shrink or expand according to success and failures, availability of land and resources, and needs for self-sustenance.