Finalist Mies van der Rohe European Award

Finalist X Bienal de Arquitectura Española

Tupper Home is the first product offered by Tupper Shop, a catalogue of architectural merchandise marketed by the Andrés Jaque Arquitectos office, an initial prototype of which has been built in Madrid. Proposed as an alternative to the official line of urban planning, it is based on the experience of demonstration marketing -Tupperware, Avon, Herbalife, Thermomix- which gained popularity following World War II and has proven effective as what could be called a pop distribution network of fresh behavior patterns.
The Tupper Home is an architectural and financial answer to three public concerns that highlight the crisis in the development model underlying Spain´s residential fabric in the Euro era, and for which detailed home design is compulsory waypoint.
Crisis #1
More technology (cheap), less land (expensive)
Setting land price to one side, the cost of projects, permits, works, financing, management and home sales have not any significant degree in recent years, while net profits accruing directly from promotion have multiplied sevenfold, currently accounting for well over a quarter of the total market price of new and renovated homes:26.9%
Rising land prices have directly influenced the increased final cost of homes and profits from their promotion, but they have not encouraged higher buildings quality or substantial innovations in design protocols. Land prices, design specialization in design and also the range of technology have firmed as independent, non-interrelated variables in the decision-making process regarding development strategies for residential areas.
We have also noted the emergence of a range of possibilities deriving from design experience, focusing on compensation for the reduction of one of the variables with an increase in another. The newest hotel chains in urban areas NH have reduced their sizes, compensating for a possible decrease in comfort with a wider range of technological options such as better soundproofing.
Crisis #2
Beneath the mortgage lies the beach!
The current average level of indebtedness amongst Spanish home buyers is 44.2%. Recently protest at El Prat airport have seen the paradigmatic argument of the union movement -”We have kids to feed!’ replaced with ‘We have mortgages to pay!’. In today’s Europe, mortgages of up to 50 years are the prime cause of labour immobility, and they define our working hours more than any other personal reason. The release of more land and consequential cost reduction would certainly influence the end cost home -land is the main component-. However, housing prices depend on sales expectations and, as we have seen recently, a reduction in the cost of land is not necessarily by lower prices but rather, increasing profit margins and higher turnover for real estate agents.
Crisis #3
More qualification, representation in the public realm
Because construction is one of the main driving forces of the Spanish economy, the level of industrialization it can achieve is a key issue in shaping the educational profile of its society and the other associated aspects: job mobility, ability to update knowledge and skills, access to information and participation in public life. Specialist labour is not necessary in 72% of construction work. The spectacular increase in low-expertise construction activity has helped in the mobilization of social groups with little education and no chance of finding training opportunities in their job context. This dwindling access to information, participation in the public sphere and ultimately emergence as groups represented by the public institutions is now a powerful source of inequality and conflict in many parts of the European Union.
The Tupper Homes system proposes three strategic design lines as an architectural response to these crises:
1. Less space, better equipped: constant services.
The Tupper home system increases the specialization of the technological solutions and the standardization of its production processes, which have a direct effect on land use optimization, enabling the same services to be maintained in spite of 55% reduction in apartment sizes. Today it is more costly to invest in size than in technology. Moreover, greater technological efficiency can reduce the overall price of the apartment by 52%.
2. Demonstrative marketing. The user sells.
Now is the time to test alternative policies for social housing promotion. The Tupper Home contains its own propagation mechanism- a pyramid system in which the users themselves demonstrate the virtues of the system to their friends, lover and even strangers, as part of a word-of-mouth sales model that has proven extremely effective in generating trust in products that strive to build a domestic reality. Users sign uo their friend to join the urban transformations process, and become their teacher, supplying them with the knowledge required to take part in the design process by choosing components from the Tupper Shop catalogue.
3. Tupper community. As a spin-off, the Tupper Home system strives to assist in the construction of a society of users who are more emancipated in terms of the need for regular income due to the lower funding costs of their homes, thus giving then more mobility and more free time. In addition, the higher training standards of operations, producers and installers is helping to raise their ability to become involved in the construction of the public sphere. Taken together, all of these factors strengthen the citizen’s public attitudes, allowing us to speak of the citizen as commissioner, a figure equipped with free time and information access, who can help to creat new areas for social action, Why no include this goal in democratic societies’ public agendas for housing promotion?
The first prototype was finishes last July. A middle aged couple planning to move away from Madrid and leave their two adolescent offspring to live on their own, are the authors of this order: anusual 30m2 apartment in the heart of the city. A plastic house saturated with colour. For the users and also the designers of this house, it was fun to think about the way the many mothers prepare Tupperware packs with home-cooked food for their independent children, because ultimately this house was built with the same sort of affection. A plastic house which encapsulates a message of love and home comfort, like croquettes in a Tupperware container. It is curious to see that things that have the same purpose seem to end up having the same appearance.
Two floors. The entrance, with a multi-purpose space running the full height oh the house -four meters- with kitchen, bathroom and wardrobes taking up the lower belt of the rooms on the upper floor. Upstairs, the library and two bedrooms set in cellular PLEXI acrylic glass cabin. The users reach the cabins by climbing sliding stairs, like the system used in old libraries. The design criteria are clear. What already existed was left the way it was, and the new was superimposed on top, with the fittings in view. Electric writing in PVC tubing, with sealed switches and new fixtures painted in bright colours, also in view. In the end, the prototype, like the expansion system, reminds the word of Tupperware and fulfils a similar purpose.