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

Introduction

Building History
From the beginning, the relationship of western modern architecture and its universal, emancipatory claims to the complexities of lived experience was complicated. There lay a fundamental opposition between attempts to best serve the masses through standardization and the cultural promise of the unrestricted development of the individual. This was further aggravated by social, cultural and economic restructuring following the Second World War.

Even The “heroes” of classic modernism had to grapple with the problem of di fferent lived actualities and attempted to find "solutions". The most widespread attempt - the normativation of space and its uses – was only one of many concepts. “Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum” (the apartment for subsistence living) for example, and the “Frankfurter Küche” (Frankfurt kitchen) represent this prevailing tendency, but diminished as it was by construction-industry based functionalism, it was harshly criticized in the post-war period.

So-called, "Functionalistic Architecture" at the beginning of the 20th century had not proclaimed itself an anti-ornamental movement, as was later insinuated by the closely related “International Style”. Their claim was a more general execution in relation to the effects on- human life. In relation to social realities, there has seldom been a design theory that is more functional than participative architecture.

From the post-war period until the late 1980s, different concepts of participative architecture were developed. A widespread approach was marked by a focus on everyday life, the regional, self-organized, or so-called, ‘vernacular architecture.’ A second line of thought targeted flexibility of the built environment. A third approach worked on concepts of more open, not entirely prearranged spaces. All these techniques of participation, which were taken up in by projects of the 1970s and then further developed, had their beginnings in early modernism. As a rule, these different strategies of approaching the dynamics and complexities of reality and everyday life emerged in combination.

Everyday, Regional, Self-organized
Looking back on historic building forms, in far-away regions, which are attributed with a more direct, original way of living or even on the daily world of consumption in the west, should lend one insight onto habitation and its self-organized forms. The vernacular architects assumed that here – and not in the history of the academic or technical development of architecture –lie the key to building methods that could embrace the lives and wishes of people. The evolutionary character of historically grown buildings, the self-organized constructions developed in accordance with circumstances of everyday life, as well as the daily practical testing of building forms were the foundations of this understanding. They attempted to focus solely on the functions and needs of daily life, and from this point of view questioned the planners understanding of themselves.

At the CIAM congresses after the second world war, associates of team 10 turned their attention to the settlements and buildings of the "third world” more intensely than previous tendencies toward the exotic. Georges Candilis and Shadrach Woods created a block of flats in Morocco in 1953, which transformed regional courtyard types in multiple-storey residential buildings. At the same time, Alison and Peter Smithson focused on everyday culture in England. In their “Urban Re-Identification Grid” for CIAM 9 in 1953, they used Nigel Henderson photographs - of a street fair and the use of the city by children in – the worker and migrant district of Bethnal Green in London to demonstrate their idea of the street as an extension of the home. Aldo van Eyck presented in the Dutch magazine “Forum,” examinations of African and South American building forms. A popularization of these perspectives was presented in the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1963, in Paul Rudowsky’s exhibition “Architecture Without Architects”. It showed photographs of settlements and buildings worldwide that had been built without the help of professional planners.

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