Studio Banana TV interviews Andrés Jaque, author of the controversial Tupper home housing project.
Tupper Home is the first product offered by Tupper Shop, the catalog of architectural products marketed by the Andrés Jaque Architects office, of which a first prototype has been built in the city center of Madrid. Proposed as an alternative to the official line of urban planning, it is based on the experience of demonstration marketing —Tupperware, Avon, Herbalife, Thermomix— which became popular after World War II and has proven its effectiveness as what could be called a pop distribution network of innovative behavior patterns.
The Tupper Home is an architectural and financial answer to three public concerns that reveal the crisis in the development model in Spain’s residential fabric in the euro era, and for which detailed home design is requisite waypoint.
Crisis #1
More technology (cheap), less land (expensive)
Without considering that the price of land, the cost of projects, permits, works, financing, management and home sales have hardly had significant relative changes in recent years, while net profits directly derived from promotional activities have multiplied sevenfold until reaching in 2007 nearly a third of the total market price of new or renovated homes: 26.9 per cent.
Rising land prices have had a direct effect on the increased final price of homes and the profits derived from their promotion, but they have not encouraged improved building quality or substantial innovations in design protocols. Land prices, design specialization and technological range have crystallized as independent, non-interrelated variables in decision making on development strategies for residential areas.
However, we have witnessed the possibilities derived from design experiences focusing on compensating the reduction in one of the variables with an increase in another The size of rooms in the newest hotel chains situated in urban areas —such as NH— has been reduced, compensating for a possible decrease in comfort with an increase in the technological range. For instance, by increasing the room’s soundproofing.
Crisis #2
Beneath the mortgage lies the beach!
The current average level of indebtedness among Spanish home buyers is 44.2 percent. We saw in the events at El Prat airport (2007) how the paradigmatic argument of the union movement —“We have kids to feed!”— was replaced by “We have mortgages to pay!”. In today’s Europe, mortgages of up to 50 years are the leading cause of job immobility and they define our working hours more than any other personal factor. The release of land and the resulting reduction in price would have impact on the final price of homes —the cost of the land is the largest of its components—.But home prices depend on sales expectations, and as recent experience has shown, a decrease in the price of land does not necessarily imply reductions in prices but rather an increase in profit margins and turnover for real estate agents.
Crisis #3
More qualification, representation in the public arena
Because construction is one of the driving forces of the Spanish economy, the level of industrialization it can achieve is a key issue in building the educational profile of its society and other related aspects —job mobility, ability to update knowledge and skills, access to information and participation in public life—.Seventy-two percent of jobs involved in a construction process do not require specialized labor. The spectacular increase in low-skilled construction activity has helped to mobilize a social group with little education and no chance of finding training opportunities in their professional contexts. The decreased ability to access information, to participate in the public sphere and ultimately to emerge as groups represented by public institutions is already an important source of inequality and conflict in numerous locations of the European Union.
The Tupper Home system proposes three strategic design lines as an architectural response to these crises:
1. Less space, better equipped: constant services
The Tupper Home system increases specialization of technological solutions and standardization of its production processes, which has a direct effect on space use optimization, making it possible to maintain the same services with a 55 percent reduction in home sizes. Today it is more costly to invest in size than in technology. And the increase in technological performance leads to a reduction in the overall price of the home of 52 percent.
2. Demonstration marketing, the user sells
It is the time to test alternative policies for public housing promotion. The Tupper Home contains its own propagation mechanism, a pyramidal system in which the users themselves are the ones who show the virtues of the system to their friends, lovers or even strangers as part of a word-of-mouth promotional model, which has proven its effectiveness in generating trust in products that aim to build the domestic reality—.The users themselves recruit their friends in a process of transformation of the city, and become their teachers so that they acquire the necessary knowledge to participate in the design process, selecting components from the Tupper Shop catalog.
3. Tupper community
As an indirect effect, the Tupper Home system seeks to contribute to the construction of a society of users who, due to the lowering in the financing expenses of their homes, are more emancipated in terms of the need to obtain regular income, gaining mobility and enjoying more free time. In addition, the higher level of training of producers and installers helps to raise their ability to take part in the construction of the public sphere. Taken together, all these factors reinforce the public attitude of citizens, allowing one to speak of the citizen as a commissioner, a figure equipped with free time and access to information, who helps to create new areas for social action. Shouldn’t this goal be included in the public agendas for home promotion in democratic societies?
First prototype
Construction of the first prototype was finished in February 2007. A middle-aged couple who is moving outside of Madrid, leaving their two teenage offspring to live on their own, are the authors of this commission: a unique 30 m2 apartment in the center of Madrid. A plastic house with saturated colors. For the users and designers of this house, it was funny to think how many mothers prepare Tupperware packs with home-made cooking for their independent children, because in the end this house was made with the same kind of affection. A plastic house which encapsulates, like croquettes in a Tupperware container, a message of fondness and home comfort. Oddly, it seems that things that are done for the same purpose end up having the same appearance.
Two floors. The first floor, the one where one enters, has a multiuse space running the total height of the house, four meters. And in which the kitchen, bathroom and closets occupy the lower part of the rooms on the upper floor. The second floor. Upstairs, in cellular PLEXI acrylic glass cabins with round windows, are the library and two rooms. A sliding ladder is climbed to reach the cabins, like in old-fashioned libraries. The design criterion is clear, what was already there stayed as it was, and the new was superimposed on top of it. All the fittings are visible. The electrical wiring in a PVC tube with sealed switches and new steel fixtures are also visible and painted in bright colors.
In the end, the prototype, like the expansion system, recalls the world of Tupperware containers and carries out a similar function.
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Harold Ortiz.
Oficina de Innovación Política
