BLD House
Madrid
2018-Present
The BLD House is conceived as Gaia Device- Preliminary Notes:
1/ As an experimental landscape, domestic space has historically played the role of a laboratory where aesthetics, politics, society, anthropology, and technologies meet materiality. In this sense, a house can be conceptualized as a Gaia device: it is an interface between the body and the politics of extraction as it multiplies the ways in which the individual takes agency in the construction of the planet.
2/ The air we exhale in our living rooms and gardens “will soon be a thousand miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” In this sense, our exhalations are agents of climate change. Beneath the ocean of air, domestic life is influenced by the complex materiality of the terrestrial atmosphere – a common vector that literally and materially dissolves the limits of one scale into another.
3/ Beyond breathing, at the core of the domestic scale, aspects of the world, the territory, and the cosmos are deeply entangled. Critically, the domestic is the scale for assemblages of ecosystems that allow humans and nonhumans to develop a politics of cohabitation and collaboration. On that scale, the individual comes to know the collective, the land and the territory, the world and the cosmos.
4/ The domestic scale breaks dichotomies between the macro and the micro by channeling a continuous flow of materiality – of goods, food, energy, water, waste, and air. It is a reflective scale in which we assemble and are assembled, materially and biologically. Between the assemblage of domestic elements and bodies is the air, breaking all boundaries and limits, flooding the space from an individual’s lung cavity to the Grand Canyon.