Iced Architects: A crib for the homeless

摘要

They have chosen as their undisputed master the early-20th-century Soviet poet-writer Daniel Charms, avant-garde voice of surrealism and literature of the absurd. Their architectural reference is the Utopian Claude Nicolas Ledoux. These are the four young members of Iced Architects, founded in Moscow in 1993. With conceptual coordinates that are as precise as they are unusual, Iced Architects operate with great ease within activities ranging from concrete projects for specific sites - with residential and office buildings - to the formulation of provocative and ironic hypotheses deriving mostly from today's climate of social unrest and attention to environmental issues. One of their projects is currently on show in the "Modernikon" exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. It is titled "Additional Space forthe Homeless" and offers a whimsical and evocative housing solution - impossible to realise but rendered attractive by the imaginative powerthat it radiates. A cell, equipped in every detail for the normal functions of domestic life, dangles from a thin scaffolding hangingfrom the facade of a huge anonymous barracks (rented); it is similar to the structures suspended on pulleys used for building maintenance. The module is individual and directly related to the single apartments of the stable residents of the building to which the homeless can turn to activate a circuit of solidarity which does not call for very many filters if not that of a windowpane. The invasion of the neighbours' privacy corresponds to the lack of intimacy of the microspace floating through the air with no coverage and protection from external eyes. Do these new systems of social relationships and a new urban aesthetic create a Utopia?