The brick in the picture is being preserved as part of the archival holdings of the Canadian Centre for Architecture on the work of the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG). Founded at the McGill University School of Architecture in the early 1970s with the goal of analysing “How the other half builds,” the MCHG focused on practices of building and dwelling in developing countries. The group’s research and project work, including experiments with sulphur concrete, were part of a paradigm shift in the discourse on the housing crises of the global South. Measures such as slum clearances and resettlement, often financed by the World Bank or other international organisations to counter the hardships of the “urban poor,” were mere expressions of the functionalist logics propagated by the construction industries in capitalist societies. Many architects and planners criticised the destruction of existing structures and practices of communal dwelling that went along with these measures, and shifted their focus to informal and vernacular building practices. The notion of Habitat, already discussed in the 1953 CIAM meeting, shaped the approaches to the human settlement problems of the poor from the 1970s onwards.
The sulphur concrete brick, developed in 1972, serves as a point of departure for the 2020 edition of the Bauhaus Lab: The participants are invited to engage with the collection of documents and materials on the MCHG held by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, also considering the archival practices surrounding the preservation of these holdings. How does the process of archiving, as a Western instrument of accumulating and storing knowledge, perpetuate hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion? Which materials and documents are being preserved, which ones are dismissed? The Bauhaus Lab assesses the delicate mechanisms of recording and documenting the fluid and vibrant practices expressed by the concept of Habitat, and attempts to reconsider the activist demands made in the 1970s by proponents of an “anthropology of dwelling” in the light of the debates on the notion of cohabitation in the Anthropocene.
