Andreas Mueller
The projects of participatory architecture assume that the participation of the future users of buildings in their planning is a form of democratic emancipation. But when we focus on the subjects of participation – the users of architecture – the following question becomes interesting: Is not it precisely only in the process of participation that the figure of the user is constructed, defined as an ideal figure and addressed as a counterpart? The constructive nature of the figure of the user in architecture becomes obvious in the question of how to address the users from the position of the architect. Are they simply clients? Are they architecture’s public, judging and legitimizing architecture according to its user-value? Are they victims of expert planning, who need the assistance of ‘advocacy planners’ to claim their rights? Should they learn how to dwell to liberate themselves, as suggested by some guidebooks in the 1980s? Are they in need of aesthetic training to formulate their own ideas?
I am interested in comparing the project of a democratized aesthetics that is promoted by participatory design strategies with recent radical democratic concepts, such as Rancière’s ‘Distri-bution of the sensible’ or Mouffe’s ‘Agonistic public sphere’. Whereas, in the 1970s, the project of democratized aesthetics in architecture was aiming at the individual emancipation from authoritarian or patronizing environments, the radical democratic project is broader. It aims at a general transformation of democratic politics into a field of negotiations. Here, the notion of space being a result of constant negotiations of conflicts between different political forces becomes important again. In this constellation, the figure of the user of space as a radical democratic subject could not only help redefine the relation between architects and users, but also open up new fields of architectural practice.
AnArchitektur– Production and Use of the Built Environment
The journal An Architektur was founded at the beginning of 2002 continuing the work of the architecture collective freies fach – a group that had sought, since the mid 1990s, to assess critically the restrictive reconstruction of Berlin and the relevant political and economical conditions through actions, exhibitions, and small publications.
An Architektur is the exercise of discursive architectural practice. For us, both the critical analysis of spatial relations and the visualization of their inherent socio-political conceptions offer a possibility of political agency. In monothematic issues, socio-political criteria are applied to concrete examples and questions of space and architecture. An Architektur exposes the wider social and political implications of topics which tend to be discussed too introspectively only within the domain of architecture as well as their effect on and relevance to everyday life.