In 2016, Igor Bragado (Gernika, 36 years old) and Miles gertler (Toronto, 31) had just founded the office of design and architecture Common Accounts when they were asked to project their first home. The clients were a couple of homosexual boys who wanted to expand a cabin overlooking one of the lakes of Cottage Country, an idyllic region in northern Ontario (Canada) very popular with fans of hunting, fishing and, finally, all those activities that show the favorite magazines of Prince Charles of England or, why not, the lumberjack cartoons of Tom of Finland. So far the prelude to this American pastoral, because the annex to the cabin had not yet begun to be built when a new character thwarted the initial Common Accounts project. At some point during the pandemic, the couple became a three-way relationship with the addition of another member who, in addition to bulging, presented some physiological peculiarities to take into account. “He is a stray allergic and cannot live with the cats that live in the main cabin, so they asked us to make a new one totally isolated,” explains Bragado by phone.
Bragado and Gertler had to redesign the cabin and place it on a slope that descends to the lake, away from the allergens that float in the main one. But did polyamory as such have any direct repercussions on the project? “Man yeah, the bed. It was necessary to put a bigger one. It turns out that there is a size greater than that of the King Bed: the California King. You can tell that California is where Americans have the best time! ”Says Bragado. And he adds that, as there are times that some of the members of the trieja He prefers to sleep alone, they arranged a second bed in the small living room that serves both as a sofa to rest for the day, and to lie down apart. Between the bedroom and the living room, yes, there is no wall that completely isolates the sleeping satellite. The same happens in the other rooms of a house that is not called Don’t let me be lonely. “It is a recreation cabin queerMiles Gertler intervenes. “In general, we took into account that its occupants have different needs from those of other family members with heteronormative relationships who usually stay in the main house.”
Those needs included, in addition to a buoyant sex life, a few hobbies interesting for Common Accounts. The trieja She is very fond of fitness and to expose themselves on the networks, precisely the topics on which Bragado and Gertler have been working since they met studying in Princetown School of Architecture. The thesis they did together investigated the relationship between funeral rites and architecture, and although a priori It sounds shocking, that led them to study gymnastics, plastic surgery and, finally, everything that allows us to redesign our bodies to show off by walking them on Instagram or the seashore, before time devours them.
“We discovered that the relationship between death and the cult of the body is ancestral. At Etruscan funerals, for example, there were athletes doing athletic exercises around the catafalque of the deceased ”, explains Bragado. Hence, these funerary constructions, the catafalques, served as inspiration for the pavilion Refresh, Renew, a kind of outdoor gym made up of a canopy of black yoga balls that they designed in 2019, sponsored by the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. The triad of death, architecture and the cult of the body also explains that the list of projects of Common Accounts includes from the prototype of a house for the celebration of funerals eco friendly and virtual in Seoul (acquired by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Korea) to a space for content creation on-line on the flagship store of the cosmetic brand Sephora in Shanghai.
“From the beginning it seemed to us that the cult of the body would be a fertile ground on which to work with our office. It is an issue that is very present in society and people are spending more and more time designing their self, ”says Gertler. “Look what happens in the army,” continues Bragado. “Thanks to the development of weapons technology, hand-to-hand combat was no longer necessary a long time ago, so in theory such tough physiques would no longer be needed. However, the military culture is paying more and more attention to the body ”.
This last idea is reflected in the military print that adorns part of the facade of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. On the other hand, the fact that the cabin had to be built on a slope allowed the different rooms to be separated not with walls, but by placing them at different heights, similar to what Adolf Loos did in Villa Müller, another of his references in this project. The cabin thus became a concatenation of platforms that set the athletic bodies of its inhabitants in motion and, as in a theater or a disco, it is perfect for display and contemplation. The latter, of course, not only for their mutual delight, but also for that of their followers in that new Arcadia in which, as Common Accounts has defended in other projects, we seek company, acceptance … that they remember us.
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