Design research on Temporary Homes
Elena Enrica Giunta, Agnese Rebaglio
Design research on Temporary Homes
Hospitable Places for Homeless, Immigrants and
Refugees
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Front Cover, The Free scenario, 2013 © Elena E.Giunta
Elena Enrica Giunta, Agnese Rebaglio
Design research on Temporary Homes
Hospitable Places for Homeless, Immigrants and Refugees
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Luciano Crespi
Prelude: New rituals of
contemporary
inhabiting
p.9
Nicola Rainisio
“These places do not
understand us.”
Environmental
Psychology of the
Refugee Centres
p. 72
Agnese Rebaglio,
Elena E. Giunta
DeCA research:
theoretical framework
p.13
Manuela Celi,
Simone Fanciullacci,
Chiara Moreschi
Cosy objects: instant
products for the
reorganization of
spaces and function
p.90
Agnese Rebaglio
Elena E. Giunta
Designing for
temporary, collective,
cross-cultural
hospitable places
p.20
‘Ithaca’ in the
Globalized era
p.32
Elena Caratti
Giulia Gerosa,
Elena E. Giunta
References
p.133
Design for
hospitable interiors:
open-ended design
solution for
welcoming diversity
p. 118
Credits
p. 140
Communication
Design for Refugee
Women. A research
project for the
Sammartini
Polyfunctional
Centre in Milan
p. 104
Agnese Rebaglio,
Daniela Petrillo
Defining scenario for a
new perspective about
reception sites
p.52
Prelude: New
rituals
of contemporary
inhabiting
Luciano CrespiI
The highly topical subject of this book raises a question. Hospitality towards
refugees is one specific and important responsibility in the broader context of public
policies framed to support ‘fragile’ categories of users. But to what extent does it
stand on its own when evaluating possible solutions regarding the nature and
quality of the environments to be created for reception of refugees? Or, to be more
specific, can the needs of political refugees influence the design culture to such an
extent that they become regarded as a theme with its own characteristics and not
part of the more general question of new modes of inhabiting public property in the
contemporary world?
To attempt to answer this we must isolate some aspects of the subject itself. First of
all, it should be emphasized that we are referring to furnished housing designed for
a population with no income and who are to be accommodated for a limited time.
This is the most delicate aspect, but it also represents the most exciting challenge for
the designers, as it forces us to think about ways of inclusion not so much on a
I Full Professor of the Design School, Politecnico di Milano, DESIGN Dept. Coordinator of the Interior Design
Course and of the Urban Interior design Master.
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neighbourhood scale, as is generally the case, as at the level of the so-called ‘primary’
space, i.e. the environments that serve as repositories of the rituals of daily life. This
also has applications for other types of users who, in greater metropolitan
concentrations, represent a large segment of the demand for public housing:
unemployed youth, non-resident students with no income, separated parents with
children, migrants, elderly people living alone, and so on – a population which, if
we exclude the economic condition it shares in common, is characterised by vastly
different cultures, lifestyles and religious beliefs. The status of political refugee adds
to all this the suffering caused by violent and forced uprooting from the place of
origin, experiences which dictate that they receive special attention (as is clearly
brought out by contributions from other disciplines in this collection).
The twin risks the project runs in these cases is to overrate the peculiarity of a
specific family of users (the corollaries of which impact mostly on areas outside its
own sphere of competence, such as management and social inclusion), and to
generalise and typify them and in that light to seek standard solutions. I am put in
mind of a very readable short essay written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, entitled “The
Philosophy of Furniture”, which is rich in both witty observations and obvious
generalisations, such as the ways in which the different populations of the world
like to furnish their homes, e.g. that Italians excel in colour and marble, the Spanish
in curtains and the English in garden furniture.II Typification, standardisation and
following rules to the letter were the obsession of the last century, reaching a point
of crisis when first the existence and then the value of ‘diversity’ began to be
acknowledged. The clearest note of warning on the subject has been sounded by art
critic Nicolas Bourriaud: “What postmodernism calls hybridisation involves grafting
onto the trunk of a popular culture that which has become uniform markers of
‘specificity’ – features, usually caricatured, of a distinctive ethnic, national, or other
cultural identity”.III This, according to Bourriaud, must be resisted by deploying the
cultural model of creolisation, a process elucidated by Antillean writer Édouard
Glissant, which represents a new way of understanding cultural identity at a time
when globalisation is steadily pursuing its uprooting agenda. Creolisation is
II Cf.Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Furniture, Palermo: Torri del Vento, 2011.
III Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009, p.20.
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0. Prelude: New rituals of contemporary inhabiting
achieved not by setting one fixed root against another, “a mythologised ‘origin’
against an integrating and homogenizing ‘soil’”,IV but by laying the foundations for
a radicantV art, which acknowledges the emerging presence of the immigrant, the
exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer as the dominant figures of contemporary
culture and recognises “the inhabitant par excellence of this imagination of spatial
precariousness as an expert in shedding his affinities”VI. The purpose is to set in
motion “circuits and experimentations” rather than permanent systems and
installations, to be established between “the identity and the learning of the Other”.
In addition to its documentation and research, the book describes three different
possible ‘environmental’ scenarios, three different perspectives, in an attempt to
give character to the places, preserving also their diversities. This represents an
important and original contribution, regarding which we may add two
considerations.
The first concerns changes in the rituals regarding how the house is used, and the
symbolic meaning that these rituals take on in different cultures. This concept of
rituals is best described by Carla Pasquinelli in her book La vertigine dell’ordine,VII
which views the furnishing of a home as “a cosmogonic act” geared to establishing
an order capable of regulating the lives of its inhabitants. At the same time, however,
it reveals the irreversibility of the process of the “slow desecration of space” and its
“polysemic multiplication”, which the idea of home strives to resist through the
adoption by its inhabitants of various stratagems. Therefore, just as the field of
contemporary art is regarded by artists primarily as a storehouse full of materials to
be manipulated, rather than an opportunity to “embark on the heroic quest for the
unexplored and the sublime”, so that of the designing of spaces dedicated to
accommodating these “modern-day nomads” should be capable of abandoning all
nomenclatures, rules and spatial types associated with rituals that no longer exist,
and replace them with culture strategies such as those outlined in the text. I would
IV Ibid., p.21.
V To Bourriaud the radicant was an “organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances”, and
therefore to be radicant means “translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors” (ibid., p.22).
VI Ibid., p.51.
VII Carla Pasquinelli, La vertigine dell’ordine: Il rapporto tra sé e la casa. Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2004.
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add, however, that we must not overlook the most authoritative and innovative
experiences in this particular sphere of design, those of Castiglioni, Sottsass,
Mendini, Joe Colombo, etc., onto which fragments from the context may be grafted.
Here flexibility is only relevant to a certain degree. More than sliding panels or other
devices that have been introduced experimentally a thousand times and with poor
results, we need to study how art today creates worlds, just as a DJ or a web surfer
does, and allow users themselves the opportunity to contribute to the act of
furnishing, thus helping to create a sense of belonging. We might describe this as a
sort of design of the ‘unfinished’, to be completed with the aid of the world of ‘little
things’, the philosophy of which Francesca Rigotti has illustrated so excellentlyVIII.
The second consideration regards the question of size. Clearly, since we are dealing
with the no-fee (or nearly so) public sector, the choice should be geared towards
low-cost housing and, therefore, a reduced floor area per inhabitant. Here, however,
we must completely revise the concept of existenz minimum developed by the
Modernist Movement, and replace it with that advocated by Alessandro Mendini,
i.e. the existenz maximumIX - a space which, even when resources are scarce, is still
capable of expressing the symbolic values and sensory qualities that help make a
place hospitable, through the use of interior design’s own means: materials, light
and colour. Recent experiences such as the experiments carried out by Philippe
Rahm on the ‘meteorological’ character of spaces, and others not so recent, such as
those of Ugo la Pietra dealing with the disequilibrating character of space and the
breaking down of the boundary between private and public and interior and
exterior, force interior design to explore more profoundly the theme of the
relationship between man and space.
VIII Cf. Francesca Rigotti, Nuova filosofia delle piccole cose, Novara: Interlinea, 2013.
IX Cf. Alessandro Mendini (ed.), Existenz maximum: giovani presenze del design fra i mistico e lo spaziale,
Florence: Tipolito Press 80, 1990.
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