The User Makes the Home
Last week, I wrote about the successful, and unsuccessful aging of different Rural Studio projects in Alabama. The 20K Houses stood the test of time, while other more civic minded projects did not. The key difference in these projects was the involvement of the user in the buildings’ creation. Now dilapidated projects, like the Glass Chapel, were well intentioned gifts to a community. The thriving 20K Houses were partially funded and built by the resident. If the user feels a sense of ownership and responsibility, any architecture can be successful.
Our discussion of favelas and other slums in class exemplifies this strange success. These sprawling communities are created by people in need. A family needs a home, so they build one where they can, be it in an abandoned sky scraper or an insanely dense city block. To an outsider, these slums look dangerous and dirty, but inside, the slums hold a vibrant community of families all interacting in their own little city. The slums are not architecturally beautiful, but each resident worked hard to find their spot and build their home. The residents’ sense of responsibility and belonging make the favelas a vibrant, if not beautiful, built environment.
A successful built environment can be created through the positive attitude of its user. Unfortunately, in a world full of fast pace developments and rentals, it is often difficult for architects to interact with the actual user. How can we, as architects, channel the end user’s sense of pride and ownership for a project into our work to make it better?
For Larger buildings I feel like it becomes delegated to a paid employee to maintain the building and then it is a matter of pride in workmanship but for the smaller projects like homes and community buildings is where the end user’s sense of pride needs to be channeled most. In America where everything we have is used and discarded it becomes very difficult for things to be maintained instead of torn down. The mentalities of “we’ll just get another one built by the municipality” or “well I don’t know how to maintain it” are two major issues I see with this functioning well in the US. I think we as architects can battle this by not building too much so that we are not just endlessly giving to the community so they feel they do not need to do anything, and we need to us methods and materials that are locally found and have local trades so that more than likely the user or the friend of the user will know how to maintain their spaces. In essence by denying the users continuous spaces they intern must maintain the spaces they have and by doing so give a bit of themselves to the space creating a loved space instead of a used space.
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