There's never a wrong answer if you never answer the question

After listening to the Tedtalk lecture given by the 2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate Alejandro Aravena, you get a better understanding between what you might find from researching about a particular community and actually engaging with the community at a personal level. Projects that are based off strictly research and what the architects "think" about what would be good for the community will be in most cases vastly different to projects where the community participated in the design process. During the lecture, Aravena explains about the reconstruction of the Constitucion in the Southern part of Chile. This project entailed designing public buildings, spaces, housing, and how to protect the city from future tsunamis. he proceeds to show clips of meetings with the communities and how angry they are with all the change and how they should build a massive wall that will do the job. Building a wall will expropriate most of the land along the coast, giving more space to the public. The thing is that the people didnt know thats exactly what was used in Japan, but that idea proved to fail in 2011 that resulted in the Fukushima Nuclear incident. Aravena explains how participatory design isnt always a "romantic" relationship and that the process is not truly meant to find the answers, its meant to find the right questions. I think architects, and architecture firms really fail with this idea of engaging with the communities we design for. They "chicken" out when things get too intense. However, when we start to ask the right questions, and we find solutions, the result will be a project that works successfully politically and socially. The architecture thats built from ideas that circle around the questions or answer the wrong questions tend to be successful in few or one of the true objectives of the project. Aravena even states, "there's nothing worse than answering well to the wrong question."