Architecture and Participation

The Molenviliet project in Papendrecht, near Rotterdam by Frans van der Werf was one of the first realized infill projects. The aim was to set up an urban structure that formed a courtyard to which the houses would be accessed. The occupants were presented with an empty support plan which they then defined through talks with the architect. Every unit is different because they were each planned by the individual user. This project involved the user in the design phase, but does not address what happens when one tenant leaves and a new tenant comes to occupy that space. 

Ottokar Uhl saw architecture as a process which needed to be able to change and adapt to the user to remain anchored in real life. The model image shows how he used fixed elements to define the space and implemented a structural grid with movable walls to allow for the reconfiguration of the space by the occupant. This flexible architecture required great thought as to how it would be used; too much freedom would cause a misuse of the space. So Uhl studied how different areas of certain qualities such as light and sound influenced how the space could be divided. This thought into how spaces can be used and reconfigured ground the building within architecture and allow it to be seen as a work that is adaptable. 

This section perspective shows the unbuilt Fun Palace of Cedric Price, and shows a building that was designed to always be in the process of construction and reassembly. The building’s participatory nature came out of the framework of the client’s program; an interactive theatre space in which the audience became the players. Price used this as the basis to create a space that was as adaptive to the users as the theater was to become. He saw technology as being a way that the everyday users would be able to reconfigure modules to always be creating new spaces.

While The Fun Palace went unbuilt, this is the InterAction Centre which is a less dramatized version of it that was located in Kentish Town. This project was completed a little over 10 years after the conception of the Fun Palace and was a scaled down version of the ideals of an improvisational architecture. The building consisted of a framework which had readymade plug-ins that could conceivably be moved.