Thematic file

Participation, Ab urbe condita

Participation, Ab urbe condita
text: Lorin NICULAE

From the Founding of the City, this is how Titus Livy dates the events comprised in his monumental historical work. The chronology begins in 753 BC, the legendary year of the founding of Rome, the quintessential city lying at the centre of an empire which had turned the Mediterranean into Mare Nostrum during the reign of Augustus. History has its origin in the City whose symbolic foundation is a participatory ritual able to separate cosmos from chaos, the sacred from the profane and the community from the world. The city protects, assembles and reveals itself by means of planning and architecture, the promotion of arts and interplay, authority and temples. Over the years, cities offered people the beauty of everyday travels and the joy of contemplating an arch, a pillar, a dome, as well as innumerable memories, encounters and debates. A harmoniously shaped ogive secretly sheltering the first kiss, the steps you slipped on while carrying your bride, the church where your grandparents got married and where you nowadays take your grandchildren, all these create a progression of lived histories conveying meaning and transforming space, with every generation, while enriching and turning it into a community legacy.
Time and again, the city acknowledges its ruptures and brutal shifts, its destruction and reconstruction. „Also, he’s left you all his walkways – in his private gardens and newly planted orchards – on this side of Tiber River. He’s left them to you and to your heirs forever – public pleasures in which you will be able to stroll and relax.” In the public square, Antony persuades the citizens of Rome of the love Caesar bore them and incites them against plotters by means of a manipulating discourse, one of the masterpieces of Asian rhetorical style. The bargaining chip is, apart from the sestertia, gaining access to public space paired up with the illusion that the decisions regarding the citadel will be made by the citizens. Paradoxically, once they obtained access to Caesar’s gardens, the masses rushed to set fire to the house of Brutus. „Mischief, thou art afoot! Take thou what course thou wilt.” Freed from tyranny, the people choose not to make use of their right to the city, destroying it instead. Act 3, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar perfectly illustrates the issue of public participation in architecture. Who makes the decisions concerning the city? Did the decision of burning down the city belong to the Roman citizens or to Antony? Did the citizens aim to burn down the houses or was the elimination of political opponents the actual purpose of destruction? The decision was made by the citizens after deliberation. Still, given the very act of deliberation and its premise, was another resolution possible? The records of public participation with respect to the decisions on the city have a long history that began to be documented sui-generis since The Enlightenment, covering utopian socialism, anarchism and communism. Similar to Roman citizens, the French people celebrated their triumph over absolute monarchy by destroying landmark buildings belonging to the abolished social system. Among these, The Bastille prison and Cluny Abbey closed in 1790 and almost entirely destroyed by 1801.
Originating in the 1960s, public participation in architecture and urban planning went from exception to dogma. At present, there are laws protecting the participatory act. However, one can readily see how cities are rather shaped by major financial interests than by their inhabitants’ wishes. The paradox is only apparent since, as Kenneth Frampton noted, „the panacea called «user participation» (hard to define properly and even harder to achieve) has only helped us to grow more aware of the insolvability of the problem”1, contemporary architecture shirks from traditional assessment criteria, replacing an aesthetics of the familiar, grounded on harmony, symmetry, proportion and rhythm, with one based on a prehensile pursuit of the unusual and the exceptional. As Bernard Tschumi put it, the city is torn between two polar vectors: on one hand, it must be new, inventive, novel, condemned to originality; on the other hand, it must naturally blend into the context and its history and receive approval from the community. Yet does the community have the necessary education to assess an architecture project, especially an innovative one? Would the community have accepted a Savoye Villa back in 1928?
Jane Jacobs recounts how the architecture columnist for an American newspaper, when asked what is the best way to tell new architecture from old architecture, gave a concise answer: if you see something ugly, then it’s new. Leaving aside the exaggeration intrinsic to the mot, there are a few uncomfortable truths getting through the glossy paper of architecture journals. Embodying the fulfilment of dreams via technology, contemporary architecture has become one of the most prominent exponents of the entertainment society. Consequently, the community only acts as a popcorn-eating spectator enjoying a film at the mall. Huge spaces lacking any human quality, metal and glass façades spreading over square kilometres, staggering heights, not to mention artificial islands hosting entertainment facilities and underwater hotels, make up a scene deprived of all traces of humane, reduced to roaring amazement, surprise and euphoria. A scene which, similar to Dorian Gray’s portrait, grows old in a gruesome manner, or more precisely, cannot assume its senescence since glass breaks to pieces, iron falls prey to rust and plywood is subject to fractures; beyond this architecture which is nothing but a mask, all that is left are conduits, piping, coolers and cables eaten with rust and clogged with mould, fungi and Legionella.
However, beyond the representation of architecture as pure spatialized power, there are contemporary architects advocating for meaning, humanity, sustainability and sentiment. Creators who take into account the spirit and the connotation of the material, the durability of the building in relation to the community taking part in its design process and the way in which it inevitably dies. The poetry of the ruins, exploited by Romanticism, is based precisely on fusing stones and soils, pairing nature and architecture invaded by grass and trees, and the persistence of memory in the collective imaginary following the physical disappearance of the material.
Although difficult to pinpoint, the arguments of contemporary architecture as art are not that different from those of contemporary painting and sculpture. The only worthy difference is that we are not supposed to inhabit any of Francis Bacon’s paintings since, insofar art is concerned, incarceration and mutilating violence stick to the status of metaphors of existence whereas architecture represents the ineluctable physical framework of life for the majority of us. This is why it is essential for a good architecture to do good to its users and the only way to achieve this is through public participation in the field of architecture and urban planning. This involves a large ethical debate which includes, in its turn, the relationship between the architect’s creative freedom and the freedom of the community to shape the physical space of its everyday existence.
If architecture best embodies the spirit of the age, this is due not only to the architects, but also to the concreteness of architecture, tributary to gravity, spatial conditionings, beneficiaries, the economic and political climate, the available funds, the builder’s skill, the user community’s education and culture and so on. Roma enim quid est, nisi Romani?, Blessed Augustine asked himself. Can architecture exist in the absence of a community meant to love, appraise and ultimately forgive its mistakes? Is there any way we can preserve built heritage without understanding its value? Can we hope for a future for our city, irrespective of its location, without being aware of our legacy? The entire architectural heritage entails an important duty that each of us owes to the city and to our own household gods.

NOTE
1. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, EUIM, Bucharest, 2016, p. 298.