Take-away Architecture: Take Architecture away

Abstract

In the beginning, Man was nomadic. Managing to establish roots in a place, in his evolutionary process became sedentary. Does the Man of the future want to be nomadic again? Aren't we regressing to the times when, some on foot, others with packs animals, were loaded with the supplies they could find in a place and proceeded to the next unknown destination? The difference nowadays, is that we limit ourselves to meet the weight restrictions of any lowcost airline, on arrival at whatever destination we get to, search the architectural "IKEA", and for a negligible cost we can get our cubicle and then we'll be able to set down anywhere we want whenever we want. The emergence of this growing globalized society gradually abandoned the tradition of continuity and permanence provoking new approaches to the concept of living, increasingly growing apart from questions like roots/origins and cultural identity. In this sense, the mobility, based on new physical and geographical infrastructures, induced a new urban appropriation based on transience, evoking the concept of non-place due to the circumstantial passage of Man, disturbing the perception of the society as we know it. Then, Take-away architecture relates to a reduction of architecture to the concept of franchising. It's the "do-it-yourself" architecture, an analogy between anrchitecture and the consumer market of the take-away and fast food. On the other hand, Take architecture away means the absolute reduction of architecture to nothing. It's the extreme of this growing society with no more room to occupy that would be fine to settle anytime, anywhere. It's a future where people simply conform to whatever is already build and just keep on assembling, overlaying the pre-existence with new forms of living spaces with unpredictable character or imagetic. Nomads developed lightweight portable structures. Sedentary preferred caves, followed by wood and stone constructions. Nowadays the rigidity of the built environment isn't following our needs. Architecture will have to keep up with the Man. If we decide we are destroying the environment we start building ecological. If we see that we are running out of resources we build sustainable. What when we realize that we need to move faster? Whose should be the disciplines to decide that? Could some kind of interdisciplinary fusion between design, architecture and urbanism solve this issue as it has been solving so far? It's not possible to know in advance what will happen in the future of architecture, but a rigorous analysis of the past and the constant evolution and renovation of dwelling, may allow us to understand some hipothesis of response to the present and future issues for this question.