The Conflict of Participation
“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The first story of public participation in architecture.
Everyone starts to learn about architecture through Vitruvius - one way or the other - it comes back to the peachy guy. In the schools that I’ve been to, De Architectura is a way to introduce what architectural education is. But there is this part in the first chapter that I’ve always found weird. In talking about everything that an architect needs to be, Vitruvius writes that an architect needs to know their history and uses the anecdote of “caryatides,” columns shaped like women that represent the shame and perpetual slavery of a traitorous Greek village. As Vitruvious writes, “Hence, the architects of the time designed for public buildings statues of these women, placed so as to carry a load, in order that the sin and the punishment of the people of Caryae might be known and handed down even to posterity.” (I.I.IV)
These columns represent the continual oppression and imperialism of a town after its pillage and occupation. The lesson intended is that if you know your history you can greatly enrich your work. But I’ve always taken it to show another truth about architecture - that it has always been the tool of the powerful.
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Jeremy Till in “The Negotiation of Hope” goes on to further dismantle Vitruvius, but also the current state of the architectural profession. He writes that architecture is in a state of denial about public participation and from this - is failing reality. As Till says, the ideal state of architecture is the few moments right after completion and before it is used. This reveals how much of a collective fantasy it has become, that we prefer our buildings without their use.
If we want to fight against this, we have to fight against the prevailing power structures that have created the current manifestation of architecture. Architects need to be embedded in the context for which they are designing, in a sense they must be designing for themselves and their community.
De Carlo parallels Till and as he writes, “Therefore the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user must dissolve in a condition of creative and decisional equivalence where each - with a different specific impact - is the architect, and every architectural event - regardless of who conceives it and carries it out - is considered architecture.”
Once we start down the road of architectural participation - the outcome is beyond our control. The result, the process, even the ability to construct a project are all debatable. More than this, the boundaries of who is the architect, who is the expert, and who are the user starts to get blurred and blended.
If we are serious about participation in architecture, it changes pretty much everything. Not alone does a radical redefining of architecture come about, but a challenge to the institution of it. I'm not sure if I am entirely comfortable with all of this.
If you agree with them you don’t believe in the status quo of architectural practice, but more relevant for us, in the status quo of architectural education. To Till, the iterative design process is useless, rendering and conventions of drawing/ drafting are supplemental, and detailing is vestigial at best.
As Till writes, so many of these 'design tools' are exclusionary acts, if we want participation we need emancipatory acts - and these acts can't use the same tools that we've had previously.
With this, architectural education would have to be one where we are accustomed to less tangible results. If we are to build participation and 'negotiate hope', an architectural studio wouldn't necessarily be directed to design a building, but rather aim to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of a built environment. It could mean building consensus in a community…that’s it. Could you imagine being in a studio whose project is to write the bylaws of an HOA? It goes against everything that we’ve been taught about our design responses which dictate that every problem can be solved through a built intervention.
Giancarlo de Carlo has more to say on this:
Till and De Carlo leave a fairly idealistic portrait of this participation, but I think fundamentally that if we introduce participation to a greater extent to architecture, we are introducing conflict to the design process. Alejandro Aarvena in his TED talk, spoke about participation being a difficult process, one that looses the romance and reveals the inner conflicts of a project. This friction deepens a project and reveals answers unasked, and has the potential to move a project past aesthetics and towards a deeper significance of design. But presumably also to grate a project into irrelevance. It is something to think about.
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ELEMENTAL - Alejandro Aravena · Colegio san Juan de Lampa · Divisare
It's hard for me to see this as cutting-edge architecture. But if we think that public participation in architecture is necessary, this is a version of the future of architecture: simple, community embedded, and relevant projects. It may not have the flash that I might hope for, but at least I don’t see any caryatide columns.
I am always moved by your writing Josiah. It is a clean and comprehensible as it is detailed and poised. I am at a place in my design career where I believe that Till is more “on” than he is “off”. Architecture students don’t know history and because reading comprehension is not necessarily enforced in architecture, interpretations of a scenario or circumstance could run a muck. This creates almost fable-esque interpretations that usually never speak to the designers, patrons and architects, intent so the things that were created are often misunderstood and their original intent defaults to fable. I am of the believe that this idea that the “one” architect is dead but the era of the “master collaborator” is dawning. Architects really believe that all things can be solved through built intervention and I find this incredibly problematic. It a repeat of the the casual relationship by the workman who only has a hammer treating everything as if it is a nail. While I confess I don’t have a solution, I am quite certain that this response to the space/time we live in is outdated….dare I say, anachronistic. Though I am not speaking directly to the idea of “emancipatory” practices that bring the public to the table, I recognize that the asymmetry cannot be overlooked. However, I would be willing to bet that most don’t know the history of the caryatides and that is a large part of the problem.
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