react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

This article examines the architectural material dissolution but ontological liveliness of Casa Galamba in São Pedro de Moel, Portugal, through a dual narrative that operates simultaneously on physical and epistemic planes. On the material level, we document concrete dissolution—salt corroding concrete, wood surrendering to Atlantic moisture, tiles cracking under winter storms. On the epistemic level, we reveal how this decay symptoms a deeper erosion: the loss of "sufficiency literacy," the existential know-how of inhabiting limits as plenitude. Through ethnographic documentation across three generations, we trace temporal compression from 120 to 15 annual days of occupation, a pattern often misread through market logic as economic failure. Yet a methodological rupture—occurring precisely when the guardian daughters' testimonies revealed love as epistemological practice—transforms our analysis. What conventional economics interprets as financial naïveté reveals itself as sophisticated alternative literacy: the capacity to read dwelling not as property but as verb, to recognize sufficiency where speculation sees only scarcity. A child's bare feet reading waxed floors embodies this literacy's final transmission—tactile knowledge accumulating in a body that will witness its extinction. Using São Pedro de Moel as method, we demonstrate how specific local dissolutions illuminate global patterns of coastal commodification and dwelling's transformation into asset. The article contributes to architectural theory by proposing "archaeology of the inhabited present" as methodology for recognizing epistemological resistance—competencies the Anthropocene urgently demands, where true literacy reads not scarcity but the sufficiency that makes life whole.