# The Rolling House by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos

The Rolling House is a project created and "prototyped" by Madrid based office Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. This piece of vertical urban fabric happens to be an assemblage of collective housing where people live for a certain amount of time with a bunch of roommates, thus creating micro-open-communities living together in a apartment.
The following pictures are disturbing for the reason that they immediately make one recalls the sum of voyeur/exhibitionist reality shows displayed on every Western TV channels. However the difference is that there is no outside here. Nobody observes, each of the inhabitant is part of the "community".
It reminds me what Patrick Bouchain and Exyzt had organized for the 2006 Venice Biennale in the French Pavilion: METAVILLA, a cheap and well designed place of life for a creative and reflective community within the architecture Biennale.

Here is the text wrote by Andrés Jaque Arquitectos:

More than 80 million people live sharing houses only within the European Union. Erasmus apartments, fancy houses shared by posh professionals, transnational immigrants slams. Sharing dwelling is a massive and diverse phenomenon, an invisible urbanism, never attracting, so far, architects’ attention, that challenges the way homes have been thought of in the last decades.

The firm Andrés Jaque Architects, has presented the built prototype of a shared house based on more than 100 interviews to people sharing its living space.. The ROLLING HOUSE. A design based on the knowledge contained by a community living, without awareness, like visionary architects thought in the sixties life would come to be like. Home is no longer the sweet, sweet un-political space for peace, but the very centre of public arena. Interior is no longer the place in which things are familiar to us, but the very place in which we face otherness. And home is no longer the place in which desire is been relieve, but the very scene in which we inhabit the space in-between what present is and what we desire it to be.
Andrés Jaque Arquitectos, presented on April 2009, the first prototype of a sharing home: The Rolling House. It’s a design in which converges the accumulated knowledge of a community that, until now, had been forced to use conventional houses for conventional families.

The Rolling House includes four strategic ideas:
1.- Assign to each room mate a intimacy space, which contains:
-A bed, by which the deployment of a screen-stock, it becomes a social space, a lounge in which to receive any visitor.
- A closet for clothes and accessories, designed as a chest that could easily be transported to the new sharing house.
-A sanctuary, like the cork in which we post the pictures that we do not want to forget.
- A greenhouse to take care of something. Because in many cases having something to watch, is the real reason why we have a house.
2. Agroup all the equipments in a junk beach. Where, without any division, in a unique and diaphanous, includes:
-A bath - shower placed over legs. In consequence, after taking a shower, we can use part of this water, after an elemenatal filtration and fat separation process, as irrigation water, a garden pot.
-A repetitive kitchen. Some fridge, some basic kitchens sets, for a house where, at the same time, some cook and others frizz.
-An Intermittent bathroom. With easy open fabric persins, a bath, a sink, a wc, that works as a unit, in a close space, just when its going to be use.
-Here and there furniture. Claiming the obsolescence of modernity. And also the incoherence of the radical today. Every furniture has a history. Those one who doesn’t required specialization would be the easiest to purchase can be reused. The ones that require specialized treatments would have the necessary technological rank. The ones that save and construct memories, would have, during all their life time the company of the Rolling House in the Rolling House. A furniture and technology parliament that looks forward to answer in a symmetric way, today’s complexity.
3.- Sharing Wall: There is no Rolling House lost in the universe. Each one has small gifts that are placed to been offer for the rest of them. If every house shares, at the same time something with the others, then all of them would have everything. In parallel to the Rolling House access hall, a wardrobe wall, contains the equipments the Rolling House shares with its neighbors. A small gym, a library, a stock of board games, a hair dryer and a Finland sauna. Each sharing house is connected with a neighborhood of houses that are united by the desire of having more through sharing.


More Andrés Jaque Arquitectos' projects on their website including the very beautiful and ingenious Casa en Never Never Land.