Self -construction (architecture) – Wikipedia

With the term self -construction In the field of architecture, strategies are indicated to replace companies with amateur operators who, in an advanced production structure, normally deal with the construction of the building on behalf of its future users.

The reasons on which the practice of self -construction is based are quite varied; In fact, users can self -establish individual homes or collective buildings for a wide range of reasons including:

• equip yourself with a home at a very low price;
• Create a housing environment suitable for particular needs of the individual and his family;
• elaborate an architectural and more personal life style;
• Living in a house that could not be allowed to acquire on the conventional market;
• Ethical motivations focused on the search for autonomy and the desire to exit the commercial system and, sometimes, on the re -appropriation of traditional techniques. Self -construction with these reasons will tend to use simple and easily available technologies on site;
• ethical motivations that may concern ecology, respect for nature or attention to recycling and reuse of materials. Self -construction with this type of motivations will presumably be available to the use of advanced and/or experimental technologies.
• Ethical motivations that may concern the integration of disadvantaged groups such as Roma and Sinti, who, responsible in the construction of their homes, exceed the logic of welfare and ghettoizing the municipal nomad camps, with consequent substantial economic savings for local administrations.

The self -construction of homes is a current practice in developing countries as well as in some industrialized countries such as the United States ^[first] and the Netherlands ^[2] ; In rich countries it is more or less strictly regulated. Sometimes self -construction is practiced in the context of certain religious (eg Mormoni) or ideological (e.g. ecovillage) communities. ^[3]
It can geographically organize itself in neighborhoods or small cities; Bidonville are one of these forms.

Some NGOs, associations or public administrations, sometimes in collaboration with economic operators such as producers or traders of building materials, support self -construction in various capacities, for example by drawing up operating manuals intended for self -construction. ^[4] .

Traditional [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Starting from remote times, the inhabitants of villages or peripheral urban neighborhoods start working to independently build the houses they need ^[5] ; The isolated or marginal community also often carry out thanks to the voluntary work of the residents of common interest. The contribution of unpaid work is in these cases motivated by a relative scarcity of financial resources, which in general corresponds to a limited level of organization or specialization of the local production structure. The technology is usually derived, without particular attention, from the historical and geographical context that welcomes the construction.

Since traditions are strongly rooted in places, the persistence of construction technologies is seen as a defense of the distinctive characteristics of a culture. Often, however, the amateur manufacturers reproduce the bad copy of technologies designed and functional for rich and advanced production systems, as in the case of the metropolitan suburbs in developing countries where self-built shacks are crowded in unhealthy neighborhoods. The social benefit of this way of popular or spontaneous self-construction is to facilitate rapid responses to the needs of particularly disadvantaged people. Costs are not only levels of pollution and degradation often unbearable but also the passive acceptance of the cultural colonization processes implicit in the adoption of a technology. A careful analysis of the production process makes the economic and environmental contradictions evident on which these experiences are founded: metal sheets that are fiery under the sun of the tropics, supporting structures built after the tampons carried, etc.

Innovative [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

A symmetrical way of understanding self-construction concerns the involvement of designers in the actual realization of the project or prototype. For researchers, the object of the investigation and innovation is precisely technology, used both in designing and in building; Technology that is extrapolated from the consolidated relationship between disciplines and specializations to try to make it more appropriate in both environmental and anthropological terms.
The reference of those who operate to integrate research and experimentation, or project and construction, can be considered Richard Buckminster Fuller, adopted as a teacher by the youth movements of the sixties and seventies who have built and inhabited the geadetics. More recently, the witness of the car-construction was collected by Shigeru Ban, which goes to create temporary homes with recycled paper pipes in areas affected by natural disasters or invites students to build thin shells with bamboo sticks.
Michael Winestock in the Architectural Association School or the Nox with their works-manifests built in first person, intend to offer new perspectives about the relationships between geometry and material, between virtual model and physical model, or between project and construction. Also because in addition to the intention of the designers, the tools of both thought and technological action are changing. A numerical control machine, capable of performing a digital drawing, is a project of the project or production? It is certainly not the property or location of the machine that defines its meaning. Certainly the border of the project tends to move a lot to the field traditionally assigned to production.

Guided [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

If the self -construction applied innovatively does not deny a precise relationship with an initial project even in the executive phase, it may be necessary for someone, technically more experienced than self -construction, guides and assist them in the construction site. In this case, it is not a question of the re -proposal of the classic figure of the leader, who on the other hand the self -construction themselves would probably live as an external imposition, but of a sort of adviser who knows how to integrate effectively into the group.
Its role will obviously not be able to be of a purely technical nature, namely that of providing advice for a more quick execution of the under construction work, but it will also have to act as an intermediary between the group and the designer in order to make the Experience of enriching self -construction for everyone.
The technical competence will certainly not be missing but must be joined by the ability to participate in the fatigue and common reasons and that of communicating with the group and understanding its internal dynamics. ^[6]

Utopian [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Some experiences have attempted to combine self -construction linked to tradition with that led to innovation. The Rural Studio through a continuous presence over time offered a qualified response to the process of abandonment and degradation to which an African-American community of Alabama seemed condemned. Just as the Ciudad Abierta in Valparaíso (Amereida) has pursued, always in a span of many years, the creation of a design and constructive utopia, offering designers/manufacturers the opportunity of an ideal rebirth. In these last two examples are the symbolic meanings of the self-construction that become predominant by evoking the liberation from the constraints of capitalism, the construction of greater solidarity between men, a condition of life in harmony with nature, feeling the architects of a A new start. Economists such as Amartya Sen, Jeremy Rifkin and Muhammad Yunus, architects such as Peter Eisenman or James Wine, narrators such as George Lucas and Gabriel García Márquez all express the urgency of a new approach to the world and life, a desire to start over, the Search for a fusion point between remote past and near future.

Teaching [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

In architecture schools (and even before in the artisan shops of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the approach centered on knowing through doing it has illustrious doors starting from the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Germany and Colin Ward in England. But the technology referred to at the beginning of the twentieth century was inseparable from industry, concentration, efficiency and, therefore, from pollution. If the beam is measured with the weight to be raised to be put in place, or the mold of the thin shell with the length of the arm, it is difficult to overcome the ability to endure the ecosystem. A sheet of paper or a canvas of Iuta, despite being flexible, become stable and resistant when they are tense; Generating a double curvature surface, pulling a sufficiently elastic membrane along the edges means minimizing the consumption of resources necessary to cover a habitable space. All principles that are better understood in practice than through theoretical explanations. An element of great attraction for those who participate in a self-construction laboratory is the opportunity to create a piece of building in its actual dimensions, especially for architecture students that have always been forced to measure themselves with the stairs of the representation. The model or prototype in small dimensions is always a conventional abstraction that interposes between project and architecture.
Since the 1900s, the Italian architect Giuseppe Cusatelli has carried out the philosophies of German and British self -construction, first with architecture students, then with end users, called to build their own home.
Among the first Italian realities to introduce the practice of self -construction in the university world was instead the faculty of architecture of the Polytechnic of Turin; The pioneering experiences born in the context of the architecture technology course held in the eighties by Giorgio Ceragioli later consolidated in the Technological self -construction laboratory (Latec), where students can practice the assembly of the building components available on the market in a suitably equipped space. ^[7]

Self-construction experiments organized in collaboration between the University of Argentina, Paraguay and Italy.

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  Integrato Tesa structure (2006)

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• G. Paba, A.L. Pecorieriello, N. Solimano, Housing Frontline. Social inclusion and self -construction and self -hearing processes , Florence University Press, Florence, 2012 [first]
• ( IN ) Mark Brinkley , Housebuilder’s Bible (ninth edition) , Ovolo Books Limited, 2011 (Ninth edition)
• P. Rossi, Architecture vs environment , FrancoAngeli Editore, Milan, 2008 [2]
• M. Bertoni, A. Cantini, Associated and assisted self -construction. Progen and construction process of a social housing model , Editor of Daedalo, Rome, 2008 [3] Filed On 20 December 2008 in the Internet Archive.
• A. Rogora, The sustainability of self -construction in the erp , (edited by), Clup Edizioni, Milan, 2006 [4] Filed On May 4, 2008 in the Internet Archive.
• F. Bagnato, Building processes in assisted self -construction , Iriti Editore, Reggio Calabria, 2002 [5] ^{[ interrupted connection ]}
• E. Dieste, C. Gónzalez Lobo, Architecture, social participation and appropriate technologies , Jaca Book, Milan, 1996 [6]
• G. Blomeyer, B. Tietze, The house is like a tree. Self -construction: a different way of getting the house , Edizioni Lavoro, Rome, 1986
• H. Fathy, Build with people. History of a village of Egypt: gourn , Jaca Book, Milan, 1986 [7]
• G. Capetti, G. Ceratioli, N. Maritano Comoglio, Regulatory problems and self -construction , Clut Edizioni, Turin, 1985
• R. Fichter, John F. Turner, Freedom to build , The Sadher, Milan, 1979
• J. F. C. Turner, Self -managed living , Jaca Book, Milan, 1978 [8]