WHAT IS HIGH-END HOUSING:
REFLECTIONS BY ARCHITECT SALVADOR MORENO PERALTA
“The real luxury was the space, and the real professionalism was knowing how to humanise it”
REFLECTIONS BY THE ARCHITECT SALVADOR MORENO PERALTA
Housing is a social need and a constitutional right but, let us not forget, it is also a market product and, as such, subject to the unwritten rules of customary demand and the written rules of regulations which, justified as an instance of hygienic and health guarantees, act as a de facto regulatory mechanism for this market and, in the end, for social control, act in fact as a regulatory mechanism of this market and, ultimately, of social control, insofar as the standardised design of the residential typology corresponds closely to equally standardised ways of life that ultimately translate uniform symbolic values. (We may live in a hyper-technified age and we may claim our right to have totally different political ideas, but the residential correlate of this technification and ideological diversification is usually of a staggering petty-bourgeois mediocrity).
But it is true that current social diversity, the phenomena derived from Covid-19, new work habits, multiple family compositions, the gender perspective and the increasingly widespread awareness of eco-efficiency, among other factors, are putting in crisis the bureaucratic and regulatory rigour that governs standard housing, whether free rent or subsidised, which prevents or hinders the obligatory typological adaptation of these dwellings to the new framework. In such a consolidated and stony product as housing, the norm always lags behind reality.
And it is in this context that we must place the concept of High Quality Housing, which DOM-3 has been singling out and promoting for several editions as the subsector, within residential real estate, where there IS room for experimentation and technological innovation, being conditioned in any case only by the constructive prescriptions of a Technical Code – like all buildings – but NOT by the criteria of spatial design, which here escape the rigid dictates of the standard, as the user has absolute freedom over the configuration of his or her dwelling.
Any practicing architect knows that in standard housing -which is often minimum housing- there is no way out of the slavery that relates useful and built surface area, because behind this lies the economic logic of the development, which is the framework that establishes the limits of its own viability.
That is why we had lost the practice, the experience of facing the fact of humanising a large space, not luxurious, but simply large, because by dint of making VOP “muriendas” (as Sáenz de Oiza called them) we had forgotten that the real luxury was not gold taps or travertine washbasins, not even domotics and artificial intelligence applied to the internal workings of the home: the real luxury was the space, and the real professionalism, knowing how to humanise it, tidy it up and give it that vibe that makes it a real PLACE to live and not a car park for people or a showcase for ostentation. It is therefore necessary to undo this misunderstanding between High Quality and luxury, unless we consider luxury as Coco Chanel saw it, for whom “luxury is not the opposite of simplicity, but of vulgarity”. Unfortunately, it is only the vulgarity of many high-end customers that is responsible for this misunderstanding.
Partly because of this misunderstanding, any approach to the residential issue that does not refer to social housing is politically incorrect, despite the fact that high-end housing is fulfilling a function that is largely ignored, but of enormous cultural, social and economic projection for several reasons:
a) Firstly, high-end housing allows for reflection, innovation, research and enrichment of residential typologies, which would be impossible in standard housing, not only for the regulatory and commercial reasons mentioned above, but also for the cultural predetermination of the developers and the users themselves; the latter uncritically assume certain internal programmes of needs, certain compositional guidelines for spaces, even certain stylistic aspects that form part of the values, aspirations and symbolism of the middle class. (One only has to look at the advertising of standard products: let’s remember when the summum of luxury was to have a video intercom, or that Madrid advertising of “authentic semi-luxury” flats)).
But in a high-end residence, on the other hand, the home is the result of interaction, collaboration and even confrontation between the architect and the client (or the developer), which provides an opportunity for one to teach the other new or unique aspects of how to live. Here the architect encounters the singular and concrete presence of a client, with a face and criteria, and not an anonymous and abstract client who demands a market product on which there is no room for variation.
b) Secondly, high quality housing has given rise to a dimension of the architect’s role that we thought was already in retreat: that of the “professional”, that of an architect’s profession understood as art and craftsmanship, exercised with the weapons of drawing, personal expressive techniques, an obligatory in-depth knowledge of materials, of history, of the history of Art, of the place… and of psychology. It is here that the architect is most similar to the orchestra conductor who has to know the possibilities of the instruments, their difficulties and their expressive limits in order to achieve perfect harmony in the combination of all of them. The architect here cannot hide; the architect of High Quality housing is always a global architect, interior and exterior (if such a thing could really be dissociated at all); the architect has to know a lot, both about architecture and construction, because here he is working on a scale of 1:1.
All this accumulation of skills and knowledge is indispensable because his task is to humanise an Aristotelian abstraction – space – by bringing it down to earth and tailoring it to the needs, not only functional but also symbolic, of a given client (hence the psychology).
c) Thirdly, these qualities of space are shaped, not only by a skilful combination of light and geometry, but also by the tactile, sensorial and enveloping effect of the materials, which requires close contact with many trades: plasterers, stuccoers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, gardeners, restorers, furniture makers, etc… many of them crafts that would probably be in danger of disappearing without the Haute Horlogerie. Among the many added values of the Haute Gamme is the rescue and survival of delicate trades and techniques, of great cultural and artistic value, which, in turn, insert other subsidiary trades and certain raw materials in the value chain (quarries, specific stones, woods, ceramics, …) with the consequent generation of qualified employment.
d) Fourthly, we have to talk about a collateral effect of High Quality housing of extraordinary consequences in the shaping of the collective character of a society at a given moment in time.
I am referring to the pedagogical work that, by reflection and emulation, the elites exercise on the social body. Architects little suspected of conservatism or lacking in social conscience have clearly expressed – sometimes in a very provocative way – that the only possibility of innovating in residential typology is to be found only in the Alta Gama; thus Oriol Bohigas responded in a 1968 survey: “…in the present circumstances it is easier to contribute avant-garde experiences in a house for the rich than in a suburban block”. And Alejandro de la Sota stated in 1982 that “architecture is either intellectual or popular. The rest is business”. Both great architects agreed on the impossibility of conceiving housing as a cultural fact if not with a freedom of action and thought that only the relative normative and economic independence of high-end housing can provide. Logically, it is not very credible that the client of Quality Housing, generally rich and right-wing, is aware of “doing a pedagogical task”: it is enough for him to affirm his right to build himself an apartment without further explanations, as is logical, without pedagogy or stories. But “sensu contrario”, have we stopped to think about the bad influence on culture of a left-wing politician living in an irreducibly tacky mansion in Galapagar, for example, or the vulgar, historicist and rancid residence built for our King when he was a prince? Without delving any deeper into the tempestuous waters of politics, I have to say that the otherwise controversial and authoritarian Manuel GFraga Iribarne, when he was president of the Xunta de Galicia, had the good idea of commissioning the president’s official residence to one of the best architects in Spain, Manuel gallego Jorreto. (end of the incursion)
Where I am going with this is to point out the somewhat archetypal status of high-end housing as examples whose influence is felt in the habits of a clientele with less purchasing power. We can also say that architectural innovations succeed when they pass from the elite into the realm of mass culture, shaping the collective values and paradigms of society at a given moment, raising the level. It is, therefore, at the level of standard architecture, and to the extent that it translates assumed values, where the seed sown by High End Architecture can be seen.
e) Fifthly, perhaps this contagion effect of the paradigms of domestic architecture has not been sufficiently analysed, but it is far more decisive in the configuration of the urban landscape and even in the character of a city, as we see ourselves and, above all, how we are seen, than the influence that notorious singular buildings may have. We judge a city by the message conveyed by the level of its average architecture rather than by that of its icons. And this average architecture is always shaped by imitation, emulation or contagion of that of the classes that have exercised a pre-eminent role in the cultural, social or economic spheres. And so the value of the architecture of the historic centre of Malaga (which could only be appreciated from the 1980s onwards) lay in the uniformity and serenity of style of the bourgeois houses of the 19th century, and Calle Larios, for example (what we might consider the “high end” of the period) was the expression of the enterprising strength of the city itself. Architectural language is not a casual occurrence, but carries messages and conveys the values that the city wishes to embody at any given moment. (In an, shall we say, instinctive way, in the Madrid of the 1960s, a group of architects led by Luis Gutiérrez Soto, developed an extraordinary High Quality residential architecture whose style ended up spreading to the entire city, giving the capital a style of its own, that of “Madrid architecture”).
High-end housing has been fulfilling a similar function on the coast from its epicentre in Marbella. We would not yet know exactly what it is, but the term is in the air: “Marbella architecture”, which by extension also applies to the high-end housing of the neighbouring municipalities of Benahavís and Estepona. Until a few years ago this architecture established a stylistic compromise between modernity and the vernacular, vernacular being understood as a confused interpretation of what for an Anglo-Saxon residential tourist embodied the exoticism of the “Mediterranean” or the “southern”. A territory, as I say, confused, which has produced jewels and aberrations, where Moroccan styles, the ochre or ochre colour of Marrakesh coincide with Mexican villages according to Hollywood, Tuscan stuccoes in pastel tones, Andalusian baroque and the marvellous popular architecture of our province: in short, the Spanish Mediterranean reinterpreted by the imagination of a foreigner and adopted and consumed by a Spaniard, thus closing the circle of an interesting symbiosis, of a cultural osmosis which, regardless of its results, has undoubtedly created a style, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but never indifferent.
f) But this style, which, as I say, ranges from marvellous examples of integrated architecture with dreamy gardens to ostentatious aberrations in the best Kazakh style, I think has been changing markedly in recent years. I wouldn’t know where the origin of the change lies, but what is certain is that high-end architecture has drifted towards a neo-rationalist and Mediterranean architecture, with simple forms, large windows under porches and pergolas that serve as an “interface” between large, compartmentalised and versatile interior spaces and interior gardens and courtyards, creating a continuous flow in the transitions of light and shadow in the best tradition of Van der Rohe, Aalto, Neutra or Sert. And, here in Spain, Coderch, Carvajal, Corrales y Molezún, Ruiz de la Prada, Lamela and so many others. The walls are usually white, forming cubic volumes, perhaps with an excess of white where before there were ochres in all their varieties. (There was a long period in which ochre was little less than a synonym for distinction, as opposed to white, synonymous with village life or rationalist boredom) with exquisite stucco or SATE-type plastering, or smooth, smooth walls, with stone or porcelain panelling.
But what is interesting is to see how this architecture, which in the high end acquires the character of a paradigm, is now being adopted by developments of lower standing but with an excellent average standard, which could be criticised for its uniformity, but in reality it is no more than the adoption by the middle classes, on an aesthetic and symbolic level, of the stylistic invariants of their models. In this way, luxury housing on the coast is serving as a vehicle of communication between the upper class and the middle or lower classes, in a society characterised by a lack of cultural links between the different social strata. Today all the advertising posters for housing developments seem to offer the same product, served by the fascinating power of infographics. That is true, but it is also true that that architecture no longer has turned balusters, split gables, acroteries crowning roofs of falsely aged tiles, grilles of a tormented baroque style and all those architectural syntagms with which the high end, from its exemplary vantage point, influenced the standardised architecture of our terraced house developments. It was the way in which the middle class believed it was expressing the ascent of a rung on the ladder of progress. Today we see that this progress has left as its aesthetic correlate a landscape of vulgarity.