The House is the Shelter

Álvaro Siza 
31/08/2006


The house is the shelter. The main element of the house is the roof and then the chimney. Inside we are independent, or almost. We are protected from the city and the whole world. Those who can leisurely use the Internet.

The house has windows: we need to breathe even when the air is polluted. It is good to go to the window. We see the street, the neighbor walks out and closes the door, people pass and motorcycles and animals and vehicles, trains, cars and planes, the air carries the noise of a plane, a gull flies by. We are not alone, happily we are not alone, the postman knocks at the door, the paper arrives.

The sun comes in through the window and paints the opposite wall, the rain hits the windows, the wind buzzes. We know that the street is out there, branches out and leaves the city, links the north, south, east and west with all the intermediate spaces, weaves a blanket with no beginning and no end because it twists, even when crossing the sea (with much effort and difficulty). The adventure is appealing.

The main element of the house is the door, more than the window, because it does not have a sill: a step of only a few centimeters to enter the world or escape to it (one can always close the door or leave it wide open).

The drainage of my house travels the world and is transformed along with that of others. The house is everyone’s self. All in all, in space and in time houses are about the same, both in horizontal and vertical terms. When there are too many stairs they invent the elevator, but they remain the same or almost, because we who inhabit them are almost the same. The house is part of a huge grid, it rotates here and there, altered by walls, by rivers, by imaginary frontiers, by huge protuberances, by bridges and by tunnels and by our immaterial selves.

I am the house or we are, whichever way. We set one apart from the other with difficulty, through numbers and irrelevant details, because it is in ruins or in the darkness or it is clean and polished like glass.

I am the owner of the house, the owner of the world, the tenant of both, which is strictly the same thing and nothing. Unless I cannot have a house and then use a cave, or a store, or a train station or the portico of the Palace of Justice (less comfortable homes and above all unacceptable: the possible ones). We are used to stealing houses from one another, or simply stealing them. We build, we sell, we demolish, we buy. Sometimes the houses are bombarded and sometimes there are people inside and there are earthquakes and other natural disasters. What a sad life, that of houses.

The house is made of coal and the door of silver. There is always a bulk against the light. Dangerous are the doors of palafittes.

Le Corbusier rolls up his trousers, resting on the tibia and the fibula he builds the locks of the Toit Terrasse, the pilotis and the myosotis.

Scattered houses like lost lambs and houses edged close to one another. They run on tiptoes lurking around and hovering above the neighbors. Poor subterranean houses, in the hills, painted blue and lila.


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