Architecture and Participation

Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, Jeremy Till, Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, Jeremy Till

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415317450
• eBook ISBN: 9781134370962
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Bringing together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of participation to some of the major contemporary figures in the field, Architecture and Participation opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it. Divided into three sections, looking at the politics, histories and practices of participation, the book gives both a broad theoretical background and more direct examples of participation in practice. Respectively the book explores participation's broader context, outlining key themes and including work from some seminal European figures and shows examples of how leading practitioners have put their ideas into action.

Illustrated throughout, the authors present to students, practitioners and policy makers an exploration of how a participative approach may lead to new spatial conditions, as well as to new types of architectural practices, and investigates the way that the user has been included in the design process.

Politics of participation

Chapter 01

Giancarlo De Carlo

Architecture's public

Editor's note ^(PBJ)

This milestone in architectural history began life as a lecture given at a conference in Liège in 1969, and was published in extended form with an English translation the following year in the Italian periodical Parametro.¹ It carries both the optimistic and egalitarian spirit of 1968 and the anger of a younger modernist generation discovering that the social ideals of the Modern Movement had been lost or betrayed. Its strongly political tone recalls a time when the impact of global capitalism was beginning to be felt, and the political implications of the aesthetic were being exposed. Thirty-four years on, much remains relevant, and many of the problems identified are still with us: the tendency for academic architecture to isolate itself in its own discourse, for example, has increased. This remains a key text for anyone concerned with participation.

The revolt and the frustration of the school of architecture

When the university protest exploded – the most important event since the end of the Second World War – the architecture faculties found themselves immediately in the vanguard. In many universities in Europe and in the wider world, students of architecture were the first to demand a radical renewal of organisational structures and teaching methods.

Why?

Because the faculties of architecture, more than any other faculty, had long been dominated by an academic body interested only in preventing new ideas from penetrating into the school (in architecture new ideas are at least 50 years old). Since the School was the last refuge into which new ideas had to penetrate, the conflict was radical at the beginning. The limits of the conservative position were solid and precise, so the prospects of renewal seemed equally solid and precise. But after an initial period of obstinate resistance, the academic body began to wonder if the new ideas were really so dangerous, especially since they were now accepted by everyone – at all levels of power, even by the state bureaucracy and property speculators. Precisely because of this universal acceptance, the suspicion grew that new ideas and young people had lost their aggressiveness. And so having reasonably accepted this idea, the academic body made an admirable pirouette, changing its previous routine without moving the axis of rotation. By accepting the most innocuous elements of a new language – and possibly by introducing a few new personages chosen from among the most innocuous proponents of these innocuities – it was possible to continue defending something of the old position. The operation promised to be a success, and property speculation – given more time and different circumstances – had already carried it through. But instead it was a total failure. Why?

Because in the meantime the students, matured by their struggle, had changed their outlook. They had realised that it was not just a matter of organisational structures and teaching methods, but a more fundamental question about the purpose of their training and social role. The objective of their struggle could no longer be simply to substitute one symbol for another, or one person for another. It was a question of rediscovering the reasons for being an architect in a world which the academics and power brokers, men of apparently opposing sides, had long accepted and which they, the students, for good reasons had refused. They sought a different way of doing architecture for the edification of a different world (perhaps best defined negatively: not classist, not racist, not violent, not repressive, not alienating, not specialising, not totalising). For architecture to regain a progressive role, it was necessary first to verify how much new material was included in that passed off as new: then to build something truly new, wholly new in content as well as in expressive forms. This has not come about, however, and perhaps it has not even begun. And so the excellent premises which fed the revolt shaded off into a state of confusion which has removed the faculty of architecture from its avant-garde position to a frustrating and inconclusive place at the rear. Why?

Because there was nothing either in the faculty or in architectural practice that could nourish a courageous exploration. There was no line of thought or collection of facts coherent enough with reality to provide a matrix of concrete alternatives for the modification of reality. The field of architecture remained amorphous and impalpable, lacking structure. Not only was it incapable of regenerating itself: it even remained insensitive to the stimuli of its own contradictions.

The ambiguity of the architect's role

Any discussion of the credibility (and of the historical legitimacy) of architecture in the contemporary world must begin with an acknowledgement of this situation, acknowledging it as the origin of any investigation of architecture's future or past. We shall begin defining the inconsistency between the field of architecture and the facts of reality by examining the behaviour of its protagonist, the architect. No other connotation of a human craft has had such wide and ambiguous meanings. The term has been applied to figures ranging from head-bricklayer to God (supreme ‘architect’ of the universe), and this unlimited latitude of meaning has weighed enormously on the destiny of those claiming the title, because it has trapped them between the frustrating suspicion of not achieving the minimum and the exalted vanity of arriving at the maximum.

In different historical epochs, depending on the use to which political power put him, the architect has been more a head-bricklayer or more a god. If not exactly head-bricklayer, he was certainly head builder at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. If not exactly God, then he was high priest and custodian of state secrets in ancient Egypt from the First Dynasty to the conquest of Alexander. In all epochs, whatever the importance of his role, the architect has been subject to the world view of those in power. Since money, materials, land and authority to act were necessary, and since the ruling power was the only force capable of furnishing him with these means, the architect by definition had to identify himself with it, even transforming himself into its operative appendage. Bourgeois society, famous for taking care of everything and leaving little room for manifestations of independence to insinuate themselves, also tried to classify the role of the architect, situating it within the more general concept of the profession. As a professional, the architect became a representative of the class in power. His duties were limited to the study and application of building technology (later also urban planning, later still environmental planning). In carrying out his duties he found both his dignity and his payment, as long as he did not worry about motivations or consequences: that is, as long as he did not refer his activity to a more general political condition. So with the rise of bourgeois professionalism, architecture was driven into the realm of specialisation, where only the problems of ‘how’ are important, because the problems of ‘why’ are considered solved once and for all. But the subjugation which succeeded so well with most human activities could not succeed with architecture. This was not because architecture had a conceptual and operative structure able to resist instrumentalisation, but precisely the opposite: because it lacked structure. We must not forget that when the sacred programme of specialisation began to succeed in a world shaken by the tremors of the industrial revolution, militant architecture remained obsessed with styles, proposing a mere manipulation of signs when what was really required was a profound subversion of concepts and methods.

But in any case, how and in what could architecture have specialised? The very school for the preparation of architects was born out of an ambiguous coupling of art and technology, destined inevitably to generate a sterile species. Its composition – still almost intact today – was derived from the grafting of a few peripheral branches of the Polytechnical School onto the old trunk of the Academy of Fine Arts, a combination of irreconcilable opposites. The academic artistic background was destined systematically to annul the formation of any concrete proposition connected with technology, while the technical was destined in turn to render commonplace any abstract expressive proposition connected with art. Forced into an inorganic coexistence, both academic art and applied technology retarded the scientific transformation of the architectural discipline and interrupted its contacts with social transformations. Thus the lack of a disciplinary structure saved architecture from specialisation but threw it into the state of vagueness and confusion which persists as the core of its contemporary trouble.

The Modern Movement: Between commitment and uncommitment

Obviously at this point one could object that there was the Modern Movement, a movement which produced many ideas and many heroes. And it is a pertinent objection: the Modern Movement represented an important chance for cultural renewal in architecture. But we need to question architecture's ‘credibility’, i.e. its capacity to have a ‘public’. And therefore we must start by addressing a fundamental question: what is architecture's public? The architects themselves? The clients who commission the buildings? The people – all the people who use architecture? If the third hypothesis is true – that all the people who use architecture are its public, and today this seems hard to resist – then the presence and the work of the Modern Movement and its heroes must emerge in a different perspective from that allowed by its own publicity machine. We cannot escape the fact that the Modern Movement has preserved substantial defects of the amorphous condition from which it emerged. For example, it preserved the ambiguity of role assumed when it became a bourgeois profession, and it sought to reconcile art and technology by simple qualitative modification of the first of these ‘two factors’, merely substituting modern art for academic art. Instead, it should have set aside the whole superfluous dilemma, questioning architecture's objectives and methods, both to allow it to become scientific and to allow it a radical expressive renewal.

But this was only the consequence of a more serious failing that the Modern Movement inherited from the amorphous matrix in which it was generated: the deliberate programmatic attitude of an elite. I do not criticise the size of the group – the fact that only small groups can set off processes of real renewal seems unquestionable – but rather the group's choices in defining its field of operation. The field which the Modern Movement intended to conquer (and did in fact conquer) was that already occupied by academic or business architecture; a field restricted to relations between clients and entrepreneurs, land owners, critics, connoisseurs, and architects; a field built on a network of economic and social class interests and held together by the mysterious tension of a cultural and aesthetic class code. This was a field that excluded everything in economic, social, cultural and aesthetic terms that was not shared by the class in power. It is true that a few ‘heroes’ had intentions and produced works beyond these limits, but always leaning out of their elite positions, never stepping out to stand on the other side: the side of the people – those who use and bear architecture. The ideas and accomplishment of such ‘heroes’ – for example a Loos or a Le Corbusier or a few others (mostly different, though oficial criticism bunches them together) – have an inestimable value which architecture cannot do without. Nevertheless they represent only a tiny speck in the great mountain of unsolved problems in the contemporary human environment. By distancing itself from the real context of society and its most concrete environmental needs, the elite attitude of the Modern Movement just accentuated the superfluity of architecture. The old gulf due to an ambiguous professional condition was widened by a further estrangement from reality, isolating architecture in a floating condition. This has favoured the formation of a few great free spirits projecting a daring search for newness, but it has also encouraged the formation of their opposite; a multitude of walk-ons destined to nullify the novelties of the former, reducing them to inert symbols completely commensurate with the requirements of the ruling class.

There is no need to describe these walk-ons in detail: they form the artichoke of cultural activity, layer after layer: philosopher, economist, sociologist, politician, historian, educator, technologist, artist, decorator, designer, builder, city planner, etc. Under the hundredth leaf you find the consultants to those in power – the expert exploiters of floor-space, the manipulators of building codes, the cultural legitimators of the sack of the city, and the territory organised by financiers, politicians and bureaucrats to the detriment of ordinary people. To describe this character further is superfluous, because he is already familiar, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Politics of participation
• 01 Architecture’s public
• 02 The negotiation of hope
• 03 Losing control, keeping desire
• 04 Mass housing cannot be sustained
• 05 Reinventing public participation: planning in the age of consensus
• 06 How inhabitants can become collective developers: France 1968-2000
• 07 City/democracy: retrieving citizenship
• Histories of participation
• 08 Sixty-eight and after
• 09 Fragments of participation in architecture, 1963–2002: Graz and Berlin
• 10 Notes on participation
• 11 Kemal Özcül’s acceptance speech
• 12 Özcül postscript: the Gelsenkirchen school as built
• Practices of participation
• 13 Animal town planning and homeopathic architecture
• 14 What if?.. A narrative process for re-imagining the city
• 15 Politics beyond the white cube
• 16 Rights of common: ownership, participation, risk
• 17 We need artists' ways of doing things: a critical analysis of the role of the artist in regeneration practice
• 18 Stalker and the big game of Campo Boario
• 19 Points, spirals and prototypes
• 20 Your place, or mine..? A study on participatory design, youth, public space and ownership
• Index