A “HOUSE” FOR A GYPSY “FAMILY”

What is a house…?

And what is a family…?

And what is their relevance, today…?

Just a few days ago we read on Yahoo News that four out of ten Americans consider marriage obsolete. That’s a very large percentage… almost half.

As for the “house,” what can we say…?

While we all need a roof above our heads, as it has been said, that roof can be restrictive and even tormenting in time, if not broken in some form or another. Let us not forget the advice Mircea Eliade had for us: “Brise le toit de ta maison!”

Break the roof of your house / home…!

This is exactly what we invite you to do.

But (there seems to always be, somewhere, a “but”) please do so not without reading the great poem by Puskhin, “The Gypsies.”

Indeed, while the seductiveness of the Gypsies’ mode of life seems to be real, in Puskhin’s view it seems the troubles of human life are unending, confined to the restrictions of a rigid roof above our heads, or outside, in the fields or forests of this world, “Gypsy-like.”

Yet, we ask you to envision alternatives to the bourgeois home, sweet as it is.

Was Bergman right in claiming happiness when he learned that after his TV movie “Scenes of a Marriage” aired in Scandinavia, the amount of divorces increased afterwards significantly…? Was he a cynic…?

We doubt it.

Quite often, the family and the bourgeois home entertain us with unsustainable illusions.

Is life to be “safe…?”

What about Nietzsche’s “LIVE DANGEROUSLY…??????”

We ask you to “live dangerously,” at least in your imagination, for now.

Please design a “house” for a Gypsy “family.”

Question everything dear architect, since, as Louis Kahn said, a question well put is more beautiful than the most beautiful answer.

Please send us ANY work, ANY size and ANY format that responds to the theme to works@icarch.us. We will publish all the works received on our new website, www.icarch.us. The deadline to submit your work is February 1st, 2011. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Thank you,

ICARCH Gallery