The house of your dreams
They sat down in front of the enormous window, in the only two armchairs in the room. Two white leather and wood armchairs, matching the footrest. The views were spectacular. They had recently moved into the house of their dreams. A moving company took care of everything. In fact, with the move they took the opportunity to clean up and get rid of weight, both physically and emotionally. Neither travel guides nor dictionaries made sense, everything was already on the internet; nor were the books they had already read. Nor the CDs. Suddenly, no dust, no silverfish, no mold. They would live in a space of glass, wood, and concrete. Energy efficiency A.
When a family looks for a home where they can watch their children grow, they often fall in love not with a house, but with a render, with a digital fiction. This computer-generated image – diaphanous, hygienic, and unreal – has become the new chimera.
The render is, by definition, cold. Well, for some it is even worse, like for Miguel Milá, who called them "horrender". It is an image that does not allow for dust, nor wear and tear, nor the charm of the patina left by the passage of years. The coldness has moved from the screen to architectural reality. If we look closely, for years an unsettling phenomenon has been occurring: the disappearance of the curve. It seems that architecture has lost the ability to draw kind, sinuous, or organic lines. Everything is rectilinear, orthogonal, implacably dry.
We are under the dictatorship of the straight line; projection tools facilitate the ninety-degree angle and modular repetition. The curve is expensive to produce. The result is rigid constructions and, by extension, a rigid society, unfriendly and unwelcoming. A house without curves is a house without corners for the intimacy of the spirit. We want to live in a render because we have been sold the idea that perfection is synonymous with happiness.
Perhaps it is time to reclaim imperfection. We need the warmth of sinuous things and the softness of a contour. Life is not straight. Life has folds, it has turns, and it has twists.
Sitting there, taking short sips from a glass of chardonnay, they could see the silver reflection of the moon on the sea, the lights of the planes approaching the airport, the city at their feet. It was all a dream, but for a moment they both thought the same thing: how was it possible that this marvel of glass, wood, and concrete was both so aesthetic and so unwelcoming? It was exactly what they wanted, and at the same time they felt a certain disappointment. It was just the shadow of a fleeting thought that they never confessed, not even to themselves.
