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Martín Azúa 1999 / Photographs Daniel Riera
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Barcelona designer Martín Azúa challenges the idea of the private home with the Basic House - an inhabitable volume that is "foldable, inflatable and reversible." Made from metalized polyester, the Basic House is a shelter small enough to fit in your pocket, allowing you to break away from the imprisonment of material ties and to reconnect to some primal instinct.
"We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. " Henry David Thoreau Walden; or, Life in The Woods, 1854.
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