Building Together: Citizens' participation in the urban renewal of The Hague (Netherlands) in the l980s

Álvaro Siza’s Negotiated Code: Housing with Citizens’ Participation in the Urban Renewal of The Hague in the 1980s

In the 1970s, the participation of citizens in processes of urban renewal was championed by several North-European municipalities as an attempt to re-connect housing policies with their social significance. The main goal was to bring together the city and its citizens, collective interests and individual aspirations. Citizens’ participation was...

Designed Self-Help: Producing Closed Forms for Open Buildings

Designing Self-help sounds like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, a great deal of the scholarly accounts on self-help housing excludes the agency of the designer, stressing instead the roles of the policy maker and the owner-builder. In the architecture discipline, from the late 1950s through the 1980s the notions of open form, group form and...

An Archaeology of the Ordinary: Rethinking the Architecture of Dwelling from CIAM to Siza

This dissertation examines architectural operations developed from the 1950s through the 1980s that challenged modernity’s “anxiety of contamination” and that have negotiated the boundaries between the realm of the individual and the social, the expert and the mass men, the local and the universal, modernity and the vernacular. The central...

Engagement and Estrangement: Participation and Disciplinary Autonomy in Álvaro Siza’s S. Victor Neighbourhood

Citizens’ participation in the design process has been discussed since the aftermath of World War II as an instrument to promote a more humanist approach to habitat. However, it has been also accused of fostering populist outcomes where the designer is merely the hand of the people, challenging the traditional limits of architecture’s...