Jesko Fezer, Mathias Heyden
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Strategies of Participative Architecture and Spatial Appropriation

Introduction

Flexible systems
The best-known strategy for dealing with the problem of unpredictable use was the flexibilization of space or the mobilization of spatial elements. It was an extension of the functionalist attempt to problem solve; in which certain parameters of the design became technically flexible and could be integrated according to different spatial demands. The space was still organized by the planners, but the possibility of certain changes was pre-structured.

In 1922 Walter Gropius developed a system of standardized components, which could be combined into a variety of building structures. They could be assembled according to a diversity of living structures and demands. With his “Big Size Construction Kit” (“Baukasten im Großen”), it was possible to produce single-family houses by combining individual components. The “Rietveld Schröder House,” built in 1924, accommodated changes in the building’s use over the course of day and night, over the course of years and over the course of the inhabitants’ lives, as well as the needs of each family member. Gerrit Rietveld installed a system of sliding- and foldable walls as well as builtin- furniture, which made the division and combination of different functional spaces possible.

A further intonation was called forth by Martin Wagner’s competition The Growing House, sponsored in 1931 by the Berlin City Council. The study group, which consisted - of Gropius, Taut, Scharoun, Häring, Mebes, Mendelssohn, Hilberseimer, Poelzig and Eiermann among others, called for ”Bauen auf Stottern” (translated as building on stuttering, which is a German expression- that means to pay by instalment): they planned a system around an affordable core building that covered basic needs and could be extended and upgraded gradually according to financial opportunities. But it was Le Corbusier who created the most explicit motive representing the idea of flexibility for residential buildings: a photograph showing a hand plugging a living Unit into a lattice structure. This visual interpretation of the Unite d' Habitation correlated with the notion of the living cell, the private "Living-Unit" independently integrated into a collective structure. In Japan, beginning in 1958, the architecture group Metabolists developed different projects with interchangeable, industrially prefabricated spaces and spatial elements that were finally realized as prototypes for the 1970 EXPO in Osaka. Another prominent example are the Plug in Cities by Archigram, in which private spaces were rarely pre-planned and were to be created out of prefabricated elements or selfbuilt. In the early 1970s, the German Federal Building Ministry took up the idea for official quarters and announced the architectural competitions " Flexible Floor plans", Elementa 72 and Integra.

Open Spaces
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe refrained from drawing floor plans for the apartments in his famous, four-storey, apartment house that he built for the Weissenhof Werkbundausstellung 1927 in Stuttgart. The newly developed steel-skeleton construction made it possible to separate the bearing structure from the elements that defined the spaces, so that only staircases, kitchens and bathrooms were fixed. The starting point for the idea was that certain areas cannot be planned by experts and that these open spaces could be laid out more effectively and more functionally by the inhabitants or by people working with them. The idea of the open floor plan, which was implemented by Mies and his colleagues otherwise only in luxurious villas, was illustrated diagrammatically by Le- Corbusier in his plans for Obus in Algiers in 1931. His draft of a strip-city with an integrated highway offered empty levels within which the inhabitants could build their houses according to their own taste. Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yona Friedman or Kisho Kurokawa further elaborate on the theoretical principles of open fields. The first implementation of this attempt was a multi-storey building in the late fifties by Erik Fridberger in Gothenburg. Nikolaas John Habraken, in his 1961 book, Supports, described in detail the advantages of such a division between a collective support-structure and private development on the resulting floors.

These early attempts to deal with the unpredictability of use in integrating inhabitants, continued according to various social claims in the participation projects of the seventies and eighties. In connection with the radical social changes of that time, different architectural concepts were developed. They ranged from radical-democratic, anarchistic, alternative, techno-utopian to reformist, to autonomous, to self-help, to flexible prefabrication. Based on the fundamental planning theory that space and what it contains influence one another, it followed that no space could be built for a presupposed use without those uses changing. Concepts that enable feedback processes, accept failings, privilege the creation of possibilities toward finished solutions, work in a process-oriented manner, offer flexible space concepts and finally enable the participation of different people, all refer to these experiences.

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