Mujer y casa: ayer y hoy / texto y diagrama

Abstract

In our postmodern times, to talk about abstractions has no sense anymore. The individualism of the late 20th century was the framework that allowed women to escape from the abstract position where they had been historically placed as an amorphous totality. Homosexuals have come out of the closet and women have left home. They have come to the public space of the global city, where they are no longer considered “the others” because they are able and allowed to buy and own, this being the most significant expression of individual freedom. “The others” are those who do not consume. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s population lives in the crap and half the children on earth go to bed hungry every night. In Western societies, the dwelling is empty of all content and therefore it is not a moral or symbolic construct arisen from a prevailing ideology anymore. As a useful art, architecture must provide the conflicts of our time with physical and semantic forms. It should accommodate behaviours whose prompting narrative points to critical utopia. At the same time, as the means to build the environment, architecture may be a tool for productive change or an agent guilty of the deterioration of the world.