the INCREMENTAL house

The marked and empty buildings are striking. There are so many of them, but they have still continued to have an active live and connection people even though their formal uses have disappeared. Some buildings just aren’t finished. And while some are just ‘tagged’ others have been taken over by people seeking housing and shelter in good locations. If there are so many empty spaces (40,000 abandoned buildings) and so many people that need housing (15,000 homeless people), why not? And Sao Paulo is a city of extremes. For a couple of years, Sao Paulo had the largest squat in Latin America . I think it would be hard to find a larger one in the world. Stretched over 22 floors (without working elevators) close to 3,000 people occupied this building for almost two years. The Prestes Maia building was occupied by the Movimento Sem Teto (MSTC) ‘roofless’, extending out of Brazil’s strong Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) ‘landless’ to bring attention to crazy and diffi...

There were many interesting connections that come together in Amsterdam . One of threads that quickly became apparent to me was how squatting (and the ideals and realities they were exposing) in the 80’s and 90’s are now very intertwined with the new lifestyle of modern housing in Amsterdam . For all the information on the squats, I am deeply indebted to David Carr Smith, and his web book: Improvised Houses of Amsterdam and all the wonderful information he has unearthed and communicated. There are three buildings in which I uncovered some interesting relationships. Edelweis The first is Edelweis. This amazing industrial building is on the KMSN island and is surrounded by new buildings and housing, as this part of the Eastern Docklands development in the late 1990’s. As the shipping industry was transformed and the harbor moved to another part of the city, old industrial land was left. This beautiful building would certainly have been destroyed had squatters not occupi...