ILLEGAL HOUSING - PEPE

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

 

The necessity of being illegal.                                                                                        

 

A building from the Old Town is being enhanced illegally. As the promoter of the development and idea of this project; but free of legal responsibilities, that lay only on the building's owner, because there is no visa for the project in The Architects Official Association or any kind of permission for that procedure, I would like to show the reasons that move me and the building's owner to accomplish such an illegal or civil disobedience action.

 

 

Legality.

 

The legal process for the building or modifying of a real property is an architect project with its corresponding visa and construction licenses. The Town Planning Office from the corresponding Town Council check the project and if it is considered suitable and completely according with the Town Planning Regulations established, aloud its construction, giving out the corresponding licenses. Once the real property is finished, it should be examined by the Council inspectors to verify the correct development of the project previously agreed and be able to hand out the occupation license or habitableness order.

 

 

The problem.

 

Problems begin when the construction licenses are denied due to failures in some parameters or aspects of the mentioned regulations. In the case of the Old Town, the final and most important goad of all is to keep in a temporary paralysis state the urban environment, limiting and defending concretely the physiognomy and the visual and functional aspects of whatever exists there or will be.

The reasons are logical: they are estimated common to the city, by a historical valuation judge and agreed by the political legislature of the times and with cultural and technical support from architects, historians and critical individuals in the definition and ordering of the urban facts.

These identity features, which want to be kept intact, and are a tourist's claim, are turning part of the city in an immobile and vein organism; a habitable "thematic park", a "spectacular dead city". The liberty, by which the citizen used to modify his property and environment, is seriously limited.

The compulsory maintenance of certain colors in the houses fronts, the exclusive use of certain materials and building solutions, the preservation or reconstruction, according to the imposed order or the usage limitations of the estate agencies, are the necessary rules to keep the image understood or supposed accepted by the people who give life to the city.

The same individuals that have been creating the different and particular communitary environments, maintain, as a paradox, the right to change their physical image; hair-styles, tattoos, different artificial limbs; clothing, cars, mobiles, etc. and even to renounce to their cultural and intellectual convictions, as many times as any free person would like to.

Changing through the years, and as a matter of fact reasonably doubtful, the protectionism nowadays established, can be assumed as servile to the intentions and image necessities that the oscillating public power representatives, want to give about the citizens.

 

 

The illegality.

 

If we ever set the possibility that our actions, at the moment of constructing or modifying an architecture cam get into conflict with the establishment and we assume the civil disobedience for space, functional or intellectual necessity reasons (personal identity necessity or the defense of a way of living), we can do two things: get to the "double hidden projects", as I like to call them, or to the absolute illegality for the inexistence of project or license, my actual case.

In the first case, it happens that the estimated project that is accepted, at the first or second attempt, by the Town Planning Office and by which we will be given the license, has got a double hidden project, that is only known by owners and constructors and give camouflaged technical solutions, so as to permit that once have been checked and be given the occupation license, the "hidden" architecture can be discovered by almost immediate means.

In the second case, the absolute illegality, the skill of the persons involved is fundamental, because building without license is complicated and risky.

The necessity of enhancing the vital space due to different reasons, according to personal concrete situations; forces, in our a case, to build illegally, a room and a washing room in the roof of a building, something that is very common and generally done in ancient cities, ignoring the limitations imposed, to make that flat habitable.

There are different manoeuvres: lifting up of materials by non noisy machinery, elimination of scumbs in vans during the night, lure- containers around, belonging to other minor close construction- site, camouflaged stockings, and, in even more interesting cases, scaffold- screens, that serve to disappear, in short periods of works, getting back to the normal face of a building under conservation laws. All these manoeuvres are made by people specialized in camouflaging jobs and made very rapidly. It is normally used the so called "minor work license", without a technical project, to undertake real reform and enhancing works, that would aloud a legal document to be shown, in case of an unexpected inspection as evidence of certain legality trend of the building process.

 

The release.

 

I believe it has just been enough justified that certain Civil Disobedience are made daily assiduous, and that far beyond trying to justify the illegality overtaken according to the number of the existing disobedients, I would like to raise a reasonable doubt about the legality of modifying your own real estate as a legitimate development of certain necessities understood as vital for citizens.

I also believe, that the evidence of the development of these illegal activities describe certain liberating impulses that produce a temporal releasing of the structuring and limiting frames for the authentic urban life. The generalized alienation of the human groups to a pathetically wealthy society, at every level, is immediately destroyed by those ones that in a subversive way, make such actions, that far from producing changes in the homologating and controlling structures, suppose a critical parody that evidence their incapacities to bound the complex reality.

 

 

NOTE: The images have been manipulated, being erased or distorted the immediate urban surrounds, so as to avoid the localization of the limbs under question.

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EXECUTION UNIT

 

Civil disobedient construct illegal, hidden housing and turn themselves in to start a public debate mediated by certain communication channels taken over for the voicing of public concerns. They try to suggest non-speculative solutions to access to and construction of housing in Seville at an affordable price, bringing to light, at the same time, the identity of a historical centre protected by rules that have ended up drying out its inbuilt fabric, due to the lack of conservation of the social networks that gave it its identity and made it run. The project uses a hedge of natural fibers to hide illegal construction on the pre-existing roof and engage a squadron of workmen specializing in illegal construction for the execution of the "wet" construction phase. This consists of: increasing the height of the enclosure wall with a foot of hollow brick, creating a floor with a little partition wall and cored brick sealed off on one side for the drainage of rainwater from the roof; bathroom (with an 80 X 80 cm shower, toilet and sink, made of GRESITE) and sealed on both sides to continue installation of the structure and light side walls through self-construction and with help from friends, who recycle the structural and closing materials of the prostheses built in Urban Situations no. 5 and no. 9.  A final covering of fiber cement is planned to provide aerial camouflage for the illegal housing.

 

Subject > Citizen

Collaborators > Pepe, friends, and a group of illegal construction workers

Materials > Left-overs from US 5, brick, mortar, bathroom fittings, heather, fiber cement, Cuba libres.

Description > Housing unit for 2 people

Approximate surface area > 22 m2 of housing and a balcony of 13.5 m