Architecture Participation And Society

For the first time, this book defines how social participation can be incorporated into architecture in a successful and practical manner, which will better serve both architecture and society. International cases and past experiences are looked at to analyse what lessons have been learnt, putting forward a set of recommendations for architectural practices and other key actors.

Bringing together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of participation to some of the major contemporary figures in the field, Architecture and Participation opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it. Divided into three sections, looking at the politics, histories and practices of participation, the book gives both a broad theoretical background and more direct examples of participation in practice. Respectively the book explores participation's broader context, outlining key themes and including work from some seminal European figures and shows examples of how leading practitioners have put their ideas into action. Illustrated throughout, the authors present to students, practitioners and policy makers an exploration of how a participative approach may lead to new spatial conditions, as well as to new types of architectural practices, and investigates the way that the user has been included in the design process.

Should all-inclusive engagement be the major task of architecture? All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture: Towards the Future of Social Change presents the case that the answer is yes. Through original contributions and case studies, this volume shows that socially engaged architecture is both a theoretical construct and a professional practice navigating the global politics of poverty, charity, health, technology, neoliberal urbanism, and the discipline's exclusionary basis. The scholarly ideas and design projects of 58 thought leaders demonstrate the architect's role as a revolutionary social agent. Exemplary works are included from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Africa, Asia, and Europe. This book offers a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of all-inclusive engagement in public interest design for instructors, students, and professionals alike, showing how this approach to architecture can bring forth a radical reformation of the profession and its relationship to society.

Dieses Buch behandelt Design und Planung als Gemeinschaftsprojekt, d.h. Gemeinde oder Auftraggeber eines neuen Projektes werden zusammen mit den Experten aktiv in den Designprozeß eingebunden, und zwar von Anfang an. Diese Methode wird für kleine und große Projekte genutzt - angefangen beim Wohnungsbau über Parkanlagen und soziale Einrichtungen über Nachbarviertel und ganze Städte. Unterteilt in zwei große Themenkomplexe behandelt das Buch in Teil 1 die Grundlagen und Methoden zur Einbeziehung der Gemeinde und in Teil 2 Fallstudien, die anschaulich darstellen, wie jedes Prinzip und jede Methode angewandt und umgesetzt wird. Schwerpunktmäßig werden visuelle und ästhetische Mittel eingesetzt, um den Designprozeß zu vermitteln. Mit über 15 Fallstudien zu Bildungseinrichtungen, Wohnanlagen sowie städtischen und ländlichen Designbeispielen und zahlreichen Checklisten und Abbildungen.

This book examines the extent to which the insights of STS can be used to analyse the role of architecture in and for social life. The contributions examine the question of whether architecture and thus materiality as a whole has agency. The book also proposes a theoretical and methodological approach on how to research architecture's agency.

Socially engaged architecture is a broad and emerging architectural genre that promises to redefine architecture from a market-driven profession to a mix of social business, altruism, and activism that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an egalitarian global society. The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement offers a critical enquiry of socially engaged architecture’s current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change, war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan the book documents the most important recent developments in the field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture, the handbook shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture actually empowers the participators and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice.

Does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Shifting the ground of this debate, which tends to assume one or other direction of influence, this innovative book explores the inherently dialectic relationship between society and the built environment. At the same time, it strives for a historically conscious discussion of a very contemporary issue. Chapters rethink the top-down model of participation and audience activation of high modernism, from Alexander Dorner's immersive museum to Mies van der Rohe's 'room(s) for play'; investigate participation in spaces under political pressure, from exhibitions in bombed-out buildings in besieged Sarajevo (1992-5) to the art and organizing of revolution in Egypt (2012-13); draw historical parallels between modes of participation and the exercise of power that are seldom compared with one another, from sites of occupation in 1968 Mexico and 2011 Spain; finally creating links between cartography and feminism and between tourism and internet surveillance. With these juxtapositions of the aesthetic and the everyday, and the built and the mediated, new questions arise: is space formed once and for all, or is it the changeable product of changeable patterns of use? Does the aesthetic always correspond to the political, or might an aesthetically authoritarian space be conducive to social justice? In exploring these questions, this book looks at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimised or liberated from it.

Architecture and Ritual explores how the varied rituals of everyday life are framed and defined in space by the buildings which we inhabit. It penetrates beyond traditional assumptions about architectural style, aesthetics and utility to deal with something more implicit: how buildings shape and reflect our experience in ways of which we remain unconscious. Whether designed to house a grand ceremony or provide shelter for a daily meal, all buildings coordinate and consolidate social relations by giving orientation and focus to the spatial practices of those who use them. Peter Blundell Jones investigates these connections between the social and the spatial, providing critical insights into the capacity for architecture to structure human ritual, from the grand and formal to the mundane. This is achieved through deep readings of individual pieces of architecture, each with a detailed description of its particular social setting and use. The case studies are drawn from throughout architectural history and from around the globe, each enabling a distinct theoretical theme to emerge, and showing how social conventions vary with time and place, as well as what they have in common. Case studies range from the Nuremberg Rally to the Centre Pompidou, and from the Palace of Westminster to Dogon dwellings in Africa and a Modernist hospital. In considering how all architecture has to mesh with the habits, beliefs, rituals and expectations of the society that created it, the book presents deep implications for our understanding of architectural history and theory. It also highlights the importance for architects of understanding how buildings frame social space before they prescribe new architectural designs of their own. The book ends with a recent example of user participation, showing how contemporary user interest and commitment to a building can be as strong as ever.