The Puritan Jesuit Colonisers in Paraguay lived in spaces organised so that all the buildings were built to border the central road of the town. This was formed into the shape of a perfect Christian cross with the church at its helm.[1] Buildings of communal importance, such as the school and the cemetery, were given sites at the tips of the cross and people’s houses looked out onto the streets, each home forming a section of the border of the cross shape. Here ‘existence was regulated at every turn’[2] by the strictly regimented routine of timetabled dinners and designated prayer times but also through the symbolical spatialization of an ideology, people literally lived, worked and carried out their duties inside the space of a giant Christian cross. This architectural layout was used to reinforce the inward looking communal strength and identity of the society because each family, through the positioning of their own house, was vital in helping to compose the material edges of the space of the Cross, which in turn was surrounded by the South American wilderness. This tied the community together through both their mutual necessity of one another in terms of having valued and necessary roles (such as vicar, farmer and doctor) and through the security of being part of a whole against the other, being one of us and not them.
The importance of how the buildings were placed in order to enforce a unanimous outlook on how the space should be interpreted and lived in can be seen in the example of looking at what happens when this layout is upset. As each physical section of the cross is a family home, the removal of one would fracture the community symbolically as the shape of the Cross would become incomplete and the purpose of the layout would become flawed. In this case the space must be inhabited and lived in (it must be produced) in the correct manner (as imposed by the routine) in order for the community to succeed and communal identity be upheld. The housing arrangements of the village are an integral part of ordering this space and consistently achieving that outcome.
[1] M. Foucault, ‘Of other Spaces’ in Diacritics vol. 16 no. 1
[2] Ibid, p184
