Participation

Giancarlo de Carlo’s essay is written in the context of 1968 student revolts, a time where a
strong need for change is felt towards academic structures established since the Age of
Enlightenment. Indeed, academism, although having started by being at the forefront of
progressive thinking in the 18th century, had been very comfortable for decades, and had
changed the idea of progress into an illusion of the progressive.
De Carlo’s criticism towards the domination of such a structure embedded in global
capitalism is felt from the title of the first ‘subchapter’ till the last sentence. A radical turn is
needed : architecture needs to build and think in a new way; an acte de création capable of
saving the discipline from its « amorphous and impalpable » consistency.

For setting this point up, de Carlo begins by describing the architect-practitioner showing at
first the underlying ambiguity of his position (the role) : some external forces, he tells us,
puts the architect on a social pedestal whenever it wants it to (and so since Imhotep till an
unknown architect of the Middle Ages) leading to a bipolar practitioner struggling between
frustration and vanity. A huge gap is to be filled in the relation the discipline has with the
‘real’. In fact the architect is merely seen as a technician, a specialist. A redefinition of his
role is crucial.
He goes on by defining the notion of credibility as the capability of the discipline to address
its questions to a public (understood as the user of any architecture), which Modernism didn’t
do. Whether it created ideas or heroes is not the question, it is the fact that the discipline hid
in a tour d’ivoire which was the result of bourgeois academism never questioned. : «
architecture is no longer credible [… since] it took an elite position on the side of the client
rather than on the side of the user » (p.6). The modern movement was merely calculating the
efficiency of a hidden project : never questioning the why but ever answering the how ;
always within but never against.

Based on this attempt to define the status of the profession, de Carlo tackles a crucial point «
the non-credibility of architecture » and arrives at a point where « architecture is too
important to be left to architects » because the organization of space is nothing but inherent to
human beings. Transforming our environment is our raison d’être. The architect should thus
be able to design a space enabling these constant contradictions (permanence) and not only
react to a preexisting problem resulting from a specific time frame. De Carlo wants to use
architecture as a political project that would give back this raison d’être to the margins. Thus,
participation as a strategy is brought up.
The goal is to reaffirm architecture as a scientific discipline capable of projecting visions of
possible environments – based on the collection of different needs of society – onto society
itself. The latter being the enabler or that vision, or more precisely they are enabling each
other. « Planning with » is thus essential. It leads to a cyclical process where : the discovery
of the users' needs operates fragmentarily against the universal civilisation of the
Enlightenment ; the formation of hypotheses suspends the result at a certain time to project ;
and the actual use shows an interrelation between the building and the user. « Then new
objectives can be set and new practical instruments be developed to produce a balanced and
stimulating physical environment » (p.20).

We can see in his notion of participation a very well established ‘scheme’ to be developed on
the basis of his essay.It is no wonder to read in the introduction of Blundell Jones and
Petrescu that participation « is accepted uncritically, and idealized notions which center on
concepts of consensus are implied » (p.2). Indeed, by acknowledging these few pages without
declaring a more defined teoria della progettazione, as Rossi would put it in his essay
Architettura per i Musei, would be a mistake.
It could easily be « labeled a marginal activity » (p.4) or be détourné from its primary
function for an opposite purpose : an illusion at the service of manipulation. When the notion
of participation will be equipped with a rational or scientific method and that consensus will
be understood as de Carlo puts it – ie. an “permanently open” event (p.13) rather than a fact –
this new way of projecting will be a factor of democracy. Not to understand the rational and
scientific as a “normative technique” (p.4), but a way to express an autonomy of the
discipline tightly bound to a transformative process such as the city and all its components.