Manifesto

Generative Habitat is a set of architectural devices that stimulates the mutation of abandoned, undervalued, and forgotten public spaces. It reveals their unexpressed potential and multiplies their possibilities of use through temporary and transitional configurations that adapt and evolve over time.

It is a spatial concept where transformation processes are triggered by microscopic gestures. Over time, these gestures enable practices of reappropriation and the progressive verification of the space's readiness for change—particularly in relation to the community that inhabits, uses, and manages it—with the aim of achieving macro-scale outcomes within a scheduled timeframe.

This approach relies on a multi-act strategy that unfolds over the medium-to-long term. However, it incorporates rapid, low-cost start-up phases to establish the conditions for modification in a shared and verified manner. This reduces the risk of failure for subsequent, more substantial consolidation interventions.

Generative Habitat is an intervention method aimed at both people and places. Through discretion, rapidly deployed reversible setups, and engaging, inclusive, and often co-designed performative actions, it generates tangible reflections and restores conditions of trust and hope, bringing back unexpected quality and beauty.

Generative Habitat means conceiving projects as parts of processes.

Landscapes and cities are the product of long-term transformation processes, stratified across time and space. This allows settlements to establish enduring frameworks, as they result from choices that ensure maximum stability in spatial configurations, socio-political balances, and the consolidated uses that generated them. Self-built architectures interpret time as the project's most precious material. For this reason, they are rapid, temporary, and possess an operational immediacy that kickstarts more complex and articulated processes over time. They make it possible to occupy the vacuum left by prolonged inertia or to inhabit the transient—yet often lengthy—period associated with the planning and execution of public works. Furthermore, they respond to the urgency of places and communities that cannot wait for natural settlement processes to sediment, having already waited far too long for better living conditions.

The speed guaranteed by the temporary nature of these architectures allows for an initial reflection on the transformability of these areas.

Through transient and reversible actions, they propose and restore possibilities of use for “forgotten spaces”.

Self-built architectures should be regarded as "pioneer species" necessary for the initial colonisation of "inhospitable territories," serving as indicators of the habitat's readiness to be regenerated and reinhabited. Therefore, self-built architectures allow transformation processes to be rebooted, testing initial outcomes ahead of subsequent consolidation phases. In this sense, they must be seen as transient devices designed to guide places and people through an initial phase of transformation, preparing them for re-discovered, new, and/or unexpected uses.

Consequently, they serve to test, explore, and question spaces and communities, even pushing them to the limit of their endurance to verify under what conditions they can still express habitat opportunities.

Precisely because they are pioneer species, they must possess a sense of "otherness" compared to what already exists, diverging in formal character and language. They should introduce innovative elements and, where possible, reinterpret consolidated settlement principles through an exploratory lens that updates their effectiveness.

Because they are pioneer species, they must be "fast-acting" devices and remain on-site for a limited time—only long enough to prepare them to welcome new conditions of habitability.

Self-building is a collective exercise in taking care of places, a renewed interest and focus on forgotten and mistreated spaces. It is a tool for unveiling unexpected, denied, and often unknown spaces that surround us without our realising it—much like the "spaces under the chair" referenced by Bruce Nauman.

Self-built practices can offer an interesting form of restitution for these sites by constructing a sense of place and belonging among communities. By participating in their reactivation, residents actively contribute to making them more liveable.

For this reason, Generative Habitats and their underlying design dimension, rooted in self-building practices, naturally bring people back to the centre of reflection and interest. Indeed, these are processes of genuine and inclusive public participation, restoring a renewed active agency to inhabitants regarding choices and spatial transformations.

The objective is to introduce new conditions of habitability by making places more welcoming, sustainable, richer in opportunities, more accessible, more inclusive, more pleasant... in short, better.

The processes of generative habitats are an act of care for places and people, originating from a design, cultural, and operational stance that is, and can only be, sentimental. In this sense, they represent affective practices, concrete utopias, proposed with the conviction that an emergency often requires only a few gestures to be resolved or at least mitigated; a few gestures, indeed, to help places and people. Furthermore, self-construction, when well-designed, represents an extraordinary investigative tool for places. It offers the opportunity to experiment—in a reversible and sustainable manner—with their transformative potential and, simultaneously, the degree to which these transformations are accepted by those who inhabit them. It is about employing the design and the built works as instruments of listening and inquiry. Given their temporary and reversible nature, they are more interesting for the processes they are capable of activating than for the finished outcomes they produce. It involves using the design as an experimental device that anticipates and makes available possible and testable prefigurations, at full scale, for a certain period of time. The design and its architectural devices are employed to perturb places, shaking them from their condition of stasis and waiting; as reactivators of place consciousness, they promote a new critical thinking regarding its unexpressed potential, turning the design and self-construction into an applied and engaged research practice.

Designing Generative Habitats requires the ability to save resources without sacrificing spatial quality and the incisiveness of the proposals. Resource conservation is today one of the primary objectives of design: saving economic and material resources, saving work already done (thus, recovering), recycling as much as possible, saving land, and saving energy.

With this concept in mind, the design can appropriately rely on limited resources. It can draw upon, or even create, a material, constructive, structural, and linguistic lexicon that is replicable and recognizable. Founded on repetition, and through the dialectic between repetition and variation, it generates a system of syntactic rules open enough to offer expressions of uniqueness on every occasion. The installations and architecture of Unica Space Force, in fact, are unique but share the same construction method, the same matter, and the same basic elements; they are all different yet all the same. In other words, they constitute parts of the same series and, despite each being autonomous and specific, they contribute to the definition of a broader project—rarefied over time and distributed across multiple locations—that involves a conceptual and operational modality capable of adapting to different contexts.

For the aforementioned points to be credible, the role of design—and therefore of architects—is decisive. The concept of self-construction addressed in this text does not refer to self-managed practices carried out by inhabitants lacking architectural culture; on the contrary, it is believed that the path forward places designers at the center of the discourse, acting both as relational facilitators with communities and as expert guides and decision-makers in finalizing choices and steering processes. Self-built architectures must be true Architecture: deliberately conceived, measured, proportioned, and well-constructed—even if self-built. In short, despite their provisional and transient nature, they must possess the ability to express the beauty expected from a work of architecture. Only under this condition will they have the strength to catalyze attention, guide processes, be recognized and respected, and thus serve as a tangible expression of the true regeneration of places. Within this framework, a new role emerges for architects—one that is less self-referential, perhaps more complex, yet extremely stimulating and profoundly useful; a role that is more ethical than strictly aesthetic, grounded in commitment and dedication.

Designing with limited resources is destined to be imprecise during the implementation phase. Imprecision is inherent to "poor" processes, to contexts of restraint and frugality. Having this awareness and accepting this condition—not as a limitation but as an invariant, as a starting point—allows us to circumscribe the resulting criticalities. If the design principles are sufficiently clear and effective, constructional imprecision will be secondary to the overall outcome; the detail will be irrelevant compared to the overarching vision.

Accepting imprecision means simplifying the detail, simplifying the construction, and simplifying the language without trivializing its meaning; it entails a continuous quest to define the framework of invariants rather than the superficial aspects of the work, focusing on principles rather than images, on the whole rather than the parts.

Imprecision becomes a problem only if one attempts to eliminate it within a context that is structurally imprecise; accepting and embracing it means recognizing the conditions of the context and interpreting it according to a principle of reality that can contribute to re-signifying it with greater awareness.

Unica Space Force pursues the precision of space and relationships, while employing detail as a grammatical tool necessary to formulate a complete discourse, rather than as the ultimate goal of its actions: the imperfection of the extraordinary always comes before the perfection of the ordinary.

Projects are, or should be, acts of synthesis. In a synthetic manner, relying on fundamental elements—on what is considered invariant—they should lead us to deliver better spaces, more suited to life and well-being.

Simplicity means resorting to the elements necessary to achieve this outcome, and not a single one more. The projects of Unica Space Force pursue simplicity through a continuous critical reading of places, self-limitation, and renunciation. Simplicity understood as synthesis is also a continuously selective operational choice, which allows one to take a stance on reality, choosing elements and characteristics of both "what is there" and "what will be there"; therefore, it involves a selection (even a limited one) of facts from the present to guide those of the future.

This position is an expression of continuity with archaic traditions and cultures that systematically and systemically hand down to us the control of imprecision. They do so by resorting only to what is necessary, through a long-term process of selection, to guarantee the proper functioning of things. Restriction allows for the more effective development of solutions that endure over time, as they are directly aimed at solving problems without mediation. For this reason, it leads to the elimination of everything unnecessary, imposing a constitutive radicality that seeks renewed balances between different scales of contextual criticality and proposes possible alternatives.

Generative architectures are a mode of thinking about the future, without predicting it. They do not fix the destiny of places, nor close them into a function, nor give them a definitive form: they build conditions for testing and accommodating unexpected uses, adaptations and appropriations that are not entirely designed, but are made possible by the design.

They are under-determined with respect to function, so that people may project onto them the use they wish to make of them, to explore and manipulate them in playful ways, and above all to let different people enter in many different ways in relation with one another.

The strength of generative architectures lies in the optionality they create. They are rapid, modular, reversible and frugal: they do not concentrate risk in an irreparable decision, but distribute it across local, legible, correctable trials. They make it possible to change course, to combine, to reuse, to consolidate what works, and to abandon without great damage what doesn’t. If they don’t work, little is lost: time, energy, money, land, matter. But if they do, much is gained: new uses, relationships, public attention, trust.

Antifragile is an architecture that does not fear people’s freedom to act upon it, and to bend it to their own purposes. It does not suppress chance and does not pursue premature efficiencies, but preserves margins and redundancies. It favours adaptations and exaptations, to accommodate ends, needs and desires — present and future. It generates present possibilities, and possible futures.

To conclude these brief lines, when faced with the question: "But what are they? What are they for?"—a question often asked by those who see and visit self-built architectures, or simply hear about them—in light of what has been argued so far, we feel confident in answering:

"They are like mirrors,
they are mirror-architectures:
they are whatever each of us
expects them to be!"