ARCHITECTURE AND IDENTITY: Destination Madrid: Architecture of legal loopholes

Saturday Commoning Fever is presented as an experimental project with quite promising aspects and others that are still undeveloped.

In a project all the components are essential and in this project it could be said that there are strong differences in quality and development between the different parts that define the whole project. The concept of departure of the project itself offers quite a wide range of opportunities, exploding the possibilities of the human activities in the urban environment to the limit of what is legally accepted. Furthermore, the broadcasting media used is quite accurate , because it does not only work as a driving force but also it tends to create an online platform, a community beyond the physical limits of the city that favours the development and the spreading of the movement surpassing the virtual world to the real materialization.

However the weak points are mainly in the physical development of the project and on its implementation.

The project is finally materialized into four different models of generic structure that are later adapted to the specific situations. However, as we are talking about specific situations because the profitable possibilities of legal chinks are not infinite it seems that the project does not seek for a so automatic materialization as the one that has been carried out. On the contrary, the study of the specific cases is essential and it needs to be showed in the final materialization of the projects, both reaching specific solutions or adaptable generic ones, experimenting with form and materials.

The prototypes are developed with a material that probably doesn't allow the flexibility the project needs, as in order to get an aesthetic result the different templates are developed with the wood palettes but they dubiously answer the needs that they are supposed to. Too generic spaces and too "versatile" with an appearance that is not in accordance with the proposed actions of use.

Generally speaking and in reference to the actions carried out (if any of them has finally been carried out surpassing the theoric field), it looks as if in spite of mobilisig the population by means of the social networks, this actions that mainly respond to cultural and educational needs, leave the author quite apart; the authors suggest their type solutions and the users take charge of the pertinent actions. The authors does not really take active part, they give the guidelines and the tools that in their point of view are valid and they somehow get out of the project, there is no real implication, no deep social awareness , it is something as if the interventions are not carried out from a real level.

To sum up, the project is not presented as a solution for basic problems but more as a way of providing the community with series of secondary necessities, that despite being so fuzzy are not individually studied but released to a prototype.

In the line of this project as for the intrusion and the exploitation of the legal chinks stands out the work of Santiago Cirugeda and his Recetas Urbanas.

However the approach of these projects is far from the previous example of Saturday Commoning Fever. These are projects based on the optimization and the adaptation, no so worried about the form as on the content, on the function and the economy of resources to answer to different necessities in a very practical and, above all, active way, empowered by the commitment, the critic and the indiscipline as main tools to make of the project feasible actions that take profit for the common benefit.

In this sense his architecture is not only a tool to provide the community with temporary facilities but a "whole critic against the usual ways in which architecture is developed according to master plans".