Llucia Ramis and the condemnation of the square meter

Ildefons Cerdà said that “the culture of peoples is inscribed by the construction of their homes, or what is the same, that civilization and urbanization run in parallel, they are the same thing”. That is why Anne Frank's house, Steinbeck's family farm in Oklahoma, or Bachelard's attic say many more things about the homes and the moments they lived through than the plans do. I am from the last analog generation, like Llucia Ramis, and I have also lived in many houses. Like her nephews, my daughters have moved around a lot until we finally got a mortgage, outside of Barcelona. But I wouldn't know how to explain shared flats, moving, and conversations with friends and loves with so much cunning. One square meter is a delight because in painful situations you have to face them with a bit of humor and sensitivity. For an architect like me, reading about life experiences in houses and burdens is material of incalculable value.If the Mary Beard of the future, two thousand years from now, reads Ramis' writings, this reading of over twenty-five years of Barcelona trajectory will constitute a very precise source of what the city means for young people without patrimony or the elderly who have lived by renting. It is very symptomatic that in the midst of the 21st century, nomadism returns to an urban world full of cities that were invented precisely to provide stability. It is one thing to change homes because you need more space or because you find work 100 km from home, and another is to have to change homes because the market always needs to extract more income and more money from it.It all runs through my head and I wonder what we've done wrong as a profession, we who studied the legacy of municipal architect Aldo Van Eyck in Amsterdam, the manifestos of GATCPAC, the revolutionary ideas of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, the shared projects of Team X, and we made industrialized housing projects to dream that it was possible to reduce costs.

In this book, very basic questions of the discipline are raised which, explained by another, lead to questioning some of the dogmas of the profession. When a project enters licensing, the project is often described in terms of space, regulatory compliance, urban parameters. The starting conditions should not be written anywhere: whether an elderly couple lives there whose contract is expiring and the rehabilitation will condemn them to look for a new apartment, or if the apartment belongs to a bank and the previous residents have been evicted to resell it at a higher price. The same happens with large urban redevelopment projects, and that's why they are so frightening. The law provides for compensation for the relocation of activities and people, but they are often just numbers, and there are not even plans or photos of the homes that will have to be demolished. Perhaps if we start to focus on these people who will be threatened by the transformation, we will generate less social aversion to building. We know, and a great deal, how to find alternative solutions for residents who live "precariously", so it would cost nothing to put them in the equation. But what's more, Ramis is from Mallorca and knows a lot about family houses converted into chalets for yoga retreats. In the house where I lived in l’Eixample with my parents, there are also tourist apartments. I’ve never physically entered it again, but it is very painful to see my old room converted into a seasonal rental dining room via the internet, simply by typing the address: 70 m² "renovated and furnished" that are rented for €1,800 per month. The furniture is from Ikea, they have stripped the carpentry, removed the false ceiling that had unique mouldings so that the joists are visible, and have re-grouted the pieces of the floor mosaics that always moved when we ran on them. My mother's contract was terminated, alleging that the heir, who had 32 properties in Badalona, owned none in Barcelona. He has never lived there. In a building from 1925, which has long since recovered the construction costs invested by the initial owner more than a century ago.The book is beautiful, but tragic at the same time. In the field of architecture, there are very good people in administrations and liberal professionals who take many risks. But if the procedures are not simplified, we will never build the protected housing we need. I believe that the most urgent thing is to publish simple regulatory criteria, approve models of reports and specifications, provide examples for each reform procedure, speed up the granting of permits or final qualifications, simplify the first occupancy and commissioning of built apartments, dealings with companies (especially the electricity company, which only responds from an anonymous form) and legalization of installations. Let's hope that, thirty years from now, the book will be a cultural fossil of a bygone era.