WS 2021 Housing Memories
Adna Babahmetović.
“Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.”
- Bachelard, Gaston: The Poetics of Space
Thanks to three houses, one's own memories are being housed. Here, they generate not only nooks and corridors but everything that's typically required to design a building.
It's structure, atmosphere, function and sometimes even its protagonists.
The memories from one's own homes become a tool for assembling new homes.
Architectural elements confront each other in the same way memories do.
Present ones cannot exist without the past ones and contrariwise.
They are fragmented yet extremely dependent on each other.
Hence, the hygiene between the units is often very limited. One is always reminded of the neighbours presence.
The project starts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in my childhood home.
Detached family house with more than one generation to reside on a same plot.
Curved staircase and a fallen cherry tree.
The second one, suburban row house in Denmark. Brick settlement from the 70s. Each house is the same.
Front yard, backyard and always the same bush at the doorway.
Third one, in Graz. Shared student apartment in an old building with a neo-renaissance facade.
Heating was not working properly, walls were catching mold, windows were never renovated.
Still, the appearance of the house was very important to our late landlord and the yellow facade and the green shutters were to be repainted at least once a year.
The Landlord was always there.
Different fragments of memories are taken from the three existing houses and interpolated into a new residential building in Graz.
The chosen Plot is a memory as well, a memory of big secluded courtyard that we were never allowed to use.
The house on the corner has been demolished recently and the project is set in its place to close the garden again.
The building may be new, but its parts already existed elsewhere.
May it be a tiny room with a big window, an imprisoned tree, or what they cause on the other side of the wall.
“We don't think enough about staircases. Nothing was more beautiful in old houses than the staircases. Nothing is uglier, colder, more hostile, meaner, in today's apartment buildings. We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?”
-Perec, Georges: Species of Spaces
Project by: Adna Babahmetović
Supervisor Alex Lehnerer