Designing for the People

This talk about urban spaces and spaces being taken over by the people and used differently than intended, has me thinking a lot about my project for comprehensive studio.  The Center for Excellence is trying to promote excellence throughout Haiti and there are a lot of good experiments and research being done there.  To promote that excellence, the people of Haiti need to have access to it to learn from it.  But giving them access to it also compromises the integrity of the experiments because they are, well, experiments.  So how can we as architects create a space that allows both?  How can we set up the space so that when the people come and take it over there isnt a way for them to jeopardize the experiments, but they also have ways of observing it?  Another aspect of the project is creating social plaza spaces.  These are other spaces where the people will take them over and do as they please.  So to what extent do we program them?  Do we program them and try to tell the people how to interact with those spaces, or do we not and let them decide?  Or do we do a combination of the two?  Its really interesting and also challenging because as architects we go into a project with the best of intentions and plan every aspect out, but in the end we cannot control how the people will actually use it. 

Here are some examples of public spaces currently available in Haiti.