Stoffwechsel of Peralta de Alcofea

This dissertation is a search for orientation in architecture’s difficult task to answer to a diverse society lacking common values. While the use of references is increasingly disputed, I am trying to emphasize the inherent inseparability between the material-nature of a human-made object and the culture that erected it. Adopting a materialist perspective, I analyse a variety of materials & skills available in the case-study, recognizing them not only as opportunity to build ecologically & pragmatically but most-importantly to provoke a joy which might be situated in the cultural realm.

We live in a diverse society where we no longer agree on common values. Some people in the design professions take this as reason to avoid references altogether. However, not even the Minimalist artist Donald Judd can erase the material-traces his objects leave. Accepting the inseparability between the nature of a human-made object & the culture of its enactment, I start my journey to Peralta de Alcofea, a small Spanish village. Antonio Naval Mas, historian native to the context, describes the hidden value of this anonymous but not vernacular architecture: “The people of the Somontano at all times needed to renew their habitat and adapt it to the demands […] by assuming forms & solutions that had been outlined by previous generations without the fear to adapt them to their tastes & needs.” (1) It is this pragmatism which made this place a fruitful Case-Study to explore raised questions. Here my aunt wants to build a house. Within a 2-kilometer radius, I find plenty materials & skills, beginning an odyssey to find the adequate material & form to respond to this place without the use of references. After the anti-intellectual turn architecture took in the early 2000s, victimised by neoliberal forces, even postcritical voices acknowledge the consequences design-decisions have on their context. And also, Posthumanism points to these non-human agencies. To surrender to its logic, means taking responsibility, for a whole chain of relations, for which one can only account through effortful examination. However, Pauline Lefebvre emphasizes, those “constraints are not obstacles against creativity, but opportunities.” (2) (1) Naval Mas A. (1988). Arquitectura domestica del Somontano (2) Lefebvre P. (2017). ‘What Difference Could Pragmatism Have Made’. in Footprint, Vol.20. p.33