BUILDING FREELY
« What Christophe tells us is that, today’s architecture has a main problem, a problem of fondations, a problem with its goals and its own production. Its goals, because one can realize that architecture has forgotten that it should take care of the very poor first, because their living conditions are intolerable. Especially because we obviously have the technical means to solve this question Its production, because one can understand that the constraints of legislation, reglementation, pretentiousness, good taste, harmony that we want to preserve or reach – all the walls that lock architecture – are unbearable. Simply because they chain up life itself. How could it be possible that we have so much resources and still we are not able to solve housing problems ? How can we accept that some men and women still don’t have places to sleep and live in ? Why did’nt we continue what we started during the years following the war, that is to say, building almost one million of housing units every year ? How comes the fact that we have so much knowledge and ressources, and still we are blocked by a past that we artificialize, idolize, perfect, and caricature ? How could we loose the faith in future and how did we become blind regarding all the contributions given by modernity ? How could we let ourself being prisoner of so much rules, grils and constraints while we have so much power ? It is incredible (and depressing), that the walls which trap architecture are higher and thicker here than over there, is’nt it ? It is incredible (and stimulating) that one has to go into the slums to find the reasons to hope and to fight in order to change the today’s world, is’nt it ? It is incredible (and exciting) that one has to go so far to remember that we can perceive the world in a more sensitive and efficent way by looking carefully to particular lives, isn’t it ? »
Patrice Goulet,
"Learning from Soweto – Building freely"