Forgoing the architect’s vision: American home economists as pioneers of participatory design, 1930–60

Anna Myjak-Pycia

doi:10.1017/s1359135521000142

Abstract

The phenomenon of participatory architectural design is thought to have emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in Europe. In 1969, Giancarlo De Carlo, one of its main advocates, presented a manifesto in which he asserted that ‘architecture is too important to be left to architects’, criticised architectural practice as a relationship of ‘the intrinsic aggressiveness of architecture and the forced passivity of the user’, and called for establishing ‘a condition of creative and decisional equivalence’ between the architect and the user, so that in fact both the architect and the user take on the architect’s role. He also argued for the ‘discovery of users’ needs’ and envisioned the process of designing as planning ‘with’ the users instead of planning ‘for’ the users.1 In the same year, De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions. Among other participatory projects carried out around that time were Lucien Kroll’s medical faculty building for the University de Louvain (1970–6) and Ottaker Uhl‘s Fesstgasse Housing, a multi-storey apartment block in Vienna (1979).

Highlights

Kindred in spirit was the phenomenon of the post-occupancy evaluation (POE), a field concerned with processes and procedures aiming at a rigorous assessment of buildings after they have been built and used for some time.3 It emerged in the 1960s both in the United States and the United Kingdom
De Carlo began working on a housing estate in Terni, Italy that involved future dwellers in design decisions
The accepted narrative of the 1960s and 1970s as the emergence of participation in design is undermined by records from the home economics collections in the archives of Cornell University and Purdue University, which show indisputably that already in the 1930s American home economists practiced many of the tenets that De Carlo, Kroll, and the post-occupancy evaluation started voicing and realising in the 1960s

Summary

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Household Economics and Management

Conclusion