People Making Places

The idea of "participation" has undergone a recent revival in many cultural and creative fields, including architecture. But what does this positive-sounding, albeit often ill-defined, concept really mean? This seminar proposes a definition of participation as "user completion," with “user” understood as both the immediate known inhabitant and the potential future one. Interrogating the dynamics of collaborative production of the built environment, over time, between architects and users, the seminar maps the impacts of specific distributions of decision-making power. The seminar focuses particularly on the implications of user completion for architectural form, as realized and as perceived. Following initial engagement with established theories from Lefebvre, Latour, and Foucault on how space is collectively produced and experienced, subsequent sessions interrogate this at three different scales—those of the individual home, the shared public space, and the evolving city—all the while asking: How have, and why should, architects make space in the way that they practice for others’ contributions? Limited enrollment.