The white house or how the decisions of others influence us

He lived all his childhood in a white, modern house designed by a recently graduated architect, whose idols were Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. In the neighborhood, where they knew little about modernism, they appreciated him because his family was an old neighbor. So it seemed to an aspiring school principal that her newlywed younger sister's house should bear the simple, geometric mark of what was then the new architecture. On a built-in shelf in the

room of that house, as a tribute, was the number of a specialized magazine where images of that recently built house accompanied a note on the rationalist style in Buenos Aires.

Naturally, the newlyweds who were to occupy it had not been trained in austere modernity. From the beginning, he did not feel very comfortable in that low house with flat roofs, without the picturesque tiles that abounded in the chalets in the neighborhood. She reproached her sister's snobbery in a low voice, who, for her part, responded with a proud gesture. Without knowing it, he had done it for the future of the children that would come, to whom he marked a direction and instilled in them a tacit mandate: to be modern by birth.

That house became a destination. Of course, no one would have defined it with that word, but something of destiny had to live in a rational and white artifact. Those nephews, from early on, had had within their reach the European postcards brought from a single trip that their providential aunt undertook when she was young, when traveling so far was not easy. Those postcards did not show white houses, but that woman offered them a model of what they could become.

From a very young age they felt proud of the difference between the modern house and the chalets in the neighborhood, which from a distance imitated what was believed to be the “English style”. They were much larger and, next to the white simplicity, they looked like hulks. That was the word that the person in charge of the new house used to designate the showy and unrefined. He used it to troche and moche, to disparagingly describe furniture, pictures and ornaments. In the Castilian of the Río de la Plata, the word cache was also used, a synonym for cheesy, which had a strong echo of social discrimination.

What was attributed to the white house, the boys who inhabited it assigned to themselves, as if, in a mysterious way, before being born, they had participated in the choice of the architect and the project, which had assigned the dimensions of a modern apartment with two spacious rooms and a service room. The oldest of them ended up there, as soon as it was considered inappropriate for him to continue sleeping on a sofa bed placed at 90 degrees from the two small beds, of course modern, that his parents occupied. Since there were no other rooms, the younger brothers slept in the

room . Things that happen when aesthetic gestures exceed material possibilities.

Since the eldest of the boys was moved to the servants' quarters, his intellectual life, if it can be called that early, has changed. He had a nightstand whose light illuminated him to read until whatever time it was. From time to time, some nights, his mother would open the door and shout: “How long with that light?”. In such conditions of independence, he read the entire Robin Hood collection (adapted books that, as soon as he realized it, he began to despise) and the Verne and Salgari that his father had given him, after having told him

The utility room was his first private space, on the back garden, with a large glazed door and window, another novelty that the young architect had attributed to his project.

That style marked him in a dimension that was not only spatial but also aesthetic, although at the time he did not realize the difference between one dimension and the other.

But the family took it upon themselves to warn their children about the innovative originality of the space where they lived, and as the older ones repeated the word “modern”, they aroused not only curiosity, but a kind of obsession.

From then on, modernity served as a sign of refinement, and they cast distant glances at the rest of the world, be it French or Queen Anne-style furniture, like the ones that were incongruously or perhaps very congruently in the living room. to be from that white house.

Everything can be attributed to the board of the architect Echeverry, who should be honored as a teacher.

Of course, the photograph of the white house in the architecture magazine added special prestige to the plain, trimless facade, the cantilevered roof over the kitchen, and the large window by the front door.

We grow up under the influence of other people's choices, which become a kind of practical education, as practical as when boys learn to kick a ball and girls are taught the secrets of elegant dress.

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