About Inhabiting: Subjects, Objects and Habitable Space

Abstract

This paper retrieves the architectural and artistic proposals of the decades after World War II that – according to the main lines of thought of those years – redefine habitable space from the perceptive and emotional factors of the inhabiting subject. The objective is to demonstrate how these productions link their aesthetic and ideological contents with previous works but, at the same time, are consistent with recent proposals as they provide applicable responses to the needs of today's world. The revision of the texts of certain philosophers, as well as the re-reading of essays by architects and artists, constitute the theoretical framework that articulates the sequence of analysed works. Methodologically, the projects and the writings that support them are successively fed back into a path that not only involves the intimacy associated with the interior of the habitable space, but also the social and environmental relations established with the exterior and with nature. This transversal approach to habitability, interlacing different disciplines to address its redefinition, is one of the novelties of the research. The critical review of the positivist and hygienist parameters inherited from the Modern Movement that these works carried out from the logic of a sustainable humanism, along with the verification of the present validity of their statements and their contribution to the improvement of habitability are some of the main conclusions of this study.