Andrés Jaque Architects

FRAY FOAM HOME . Venice architecture biennale 2010

photos: Andrés Jaque . designboom

Homes are arenas in which the political currently finds opportunities to happen. FRAY FOAM HOME is the restitution of the fragmented spaces in which a specific home -with its comforts, supplies and fictions- is constructed. Sweet Homes are no longer apolitical spaces for familiarity, but distant-bubbled-made-foams joined by conflict and fray. Distribution and uses of water, energy exploitation, right for access to fiction, engagement with transgendered individual roles are the arenas in which societies get shaped. What does this home look like? That is what FRAY FOAM HOME aims to approach.

FRAY FOAM HOME by Andrés Jaque Architects from ArchiShots on Vimeo.


'fray foam home' comes from the detailed study of the dependencies and polemics in which a
specific flat in madrid’s calle del pez happen. a flat shared by five people with personal daily
options. the installation is an approach to the restitution of the distant contextual fragments
and public polemics in which their daily lives are installed. what gets visible, gets critical
and accountable. what are the politics of design emerging from - opening the black box
of expanded multi-located homes? that is the question architecture can build up.
a local interior design for global occupancies, which could be detailed in three questions:

1. what if consumption locations and productive ones could be experienced simultaneously?
could we produce a notion of relational beauty, closer to ‘parliaments’ than to ‘white boxes’?

2. what if we try to build with resilience and redundancy rather than with zoning and spatial
specialization? could a sensitivity for forecasting and optimizing be replaced by one of risk
management and adaptability?

3. what if conflict could be politically managed? could the management of difference
and controversies be taken to daily life? could we transform the material architectural devices
that mediate in our social installation to move from a territorial antagonism to a foam-like agonism?

architecture is often the device to promote territorial distribution in order to ensure realms of
‘sweet local calm’, but it can also be a time in which the architecture of daily realities become compulsory pass points for the polemics in which they are constructed.

Team: Alejandro Sajgalik, Walter Cuccuru, Carolina Silvana Vaca, Mehrdad Nazemi, Ángela Bailén, Patricia Acosta, Diana Calvache, Sizhou Yang and Silvia Rodríguez.