Читать книгу Congreso Internacional Comunicación, ciudad y espacio público - Ángeles Margarita Maqueira Yamasaki - Страница 11

On 24 January 1985, Álvaro Siza and several technicians involved in the Punt en Komma project travelled to the ROL to meet with the group Bouwen in 5, an association of residents in Schilderwijk’s deelgebied 5. The goal of the working day at the ROL was to assess the qualities and problems of a floor plan for a housing complex located in the Rembrandtstraat, elsewhere in the Schilderswijk district, developed earlier by the housing corporation’s-Gravenhage, the client of Punt en Komma.

In the introduction to the meeting, Siza highlighted the need to understand the way people live as the basis for a research aimed at improving it. Considering the demographics of the neighbourhood, Siza duly noted the absence of foreign residents in the meeting, and stressed the importance of receiving contributions from all the different groups of residents in the deelgebied 5. “The aim is to develop a plan that can be suitable for both Dutch and foreign residents,” Siza claimed¹². Many critiques and suggestions were made after experiencing the full-scale mock-up of the dwelling unit. The accessibility to the kitchen, the rigidity of the partitions, the mix of sleeping and living areas, and the area and structure of the distribution areas were the most noticed remarks.

After this working session at the ROL, the participants made a summary of requirements, to be taken into account by Siza in the development of the project. Then, using his own critical assessment of the residents’ review on the unit tested at the ROL workshop, Siza developed a layout proposal for the Punt en Komma dwellings. There were conspicuous changes to the initial layout tested at the ROL, first and foremost the introduction of a clear distribution area and a better differentiation between the public areas (kitchen and living room) and the private areas (bedrooms and toilet). The layout developed by Siza placed on the street side a larger living room with a semi-open kitchen next to it, while the bedrooms were placed facing the courtyard of the building. These two main areas were articulated by a system of double distribution in U shape, divided by a closet, and connecting all partitions.

Following up on these initial contacts, in March 1985, the group Bouwen in 5 issued a list of principles they believed essential for a smooth relation between the different stakeholders¹³. Among these principles, the issue of the communication between the architect and the residents was also addressed. They suggested “the architects should, as far as possible, use spatial methods of representation: isometrics, perspective drawings, models, photomontages and so on”¹⁴. In effect, on 22 April 1985, the same group, together with other associations of deelgebied 5 residents, distributed a document with the title Bewonersparticipatie: Nu en in de toekomst (Residents’ participation: Now and in the future), where they presented several requirements for an effective and fruitful participation of the residents in the design decision-making process. Among these requirements, the ROL workshops were considered an important component of a design process aimed at “building a home and not just a house”¹⁵.

Hence, over the following months several working days were organized at the ROL to discuss the floor plan of the dwellings. On 11 July 1985, a working day with eleven Turkish residents was held in the ROL housed in the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology¹⁶. In the meeting’s introduction delivered by Jacques Poot, the residents’ expert, he emphasized the importance of having the foreign residents involved in the process, as they represent approximately half of the population living in the deelgebied 5. However, as Siza had remarked some months earlier, Poot also contended that it “must be kept in mind that the houses should be suitable for all populations, and not specifically for foreign residents”¹⁷. The report of the assessment made by the Turkish residents underlines their good acceptance of the dwelling layout, especially the flexibility of the plan, and the clear separation between living and sleeping areas, as well as their position in the building: the living room on the street side and the bedrooms on the courtyard side. The surface area of some partitions was criticized as well as the location of the kitchen and bathroom appliances. In the written account of this working day at the ROL, the author of the report noted it was remarkable the detailed appraisals to the plan made by the Turkish residents. Despite this process was something completely new to them, the report stated they showed interest as if it was their own home already. The importance of having a full-scale model instead of drawings was seen as instrumental, and the conclusion was thus clear: “working in this way is therefore very valuable”.

On 6 September, 1985, the members of the project’s bouwteam (construction team) visited The Hague’s municipal ROL, in Scheveningen, and changed on the spot some parts of the model of the typical ground floor dwelling of the Punt en Komma buildings, which had been discussed in the bouwteam’s meeting held on the previous day. On the next day, 7 September, the neighbourhood office de Hoefeiser (The Horseshoe) organized a visit to the ROL with residents of the deelgebied 5 to experience and discuss the full-scale mock-up of the dwelling. About thirty residents were present, among which half were immigrants, all male, and mostly of Turkish origin. This was a fundamental test to check the extent to which Siza’s initial goal of designing a dwelling able to accommodate different cultural backgrounds had been successfully accomplished or not.

There was a broad appraisal on the general layout of the dwelling but the participants in the workshop also made critical remarks. The group of immigrant residents, predominantly Muslims, suggested the living room and the entrance hallway should be bigger. The sliding door to the master bedroom was criticized and they proposed the toilet should be placed closer to the entrance and distant from the living room. The review of the group of native Dutch residents mentioned mostly the same, except the criticism on the sliding door to the master bedroom. The critique on the position of the balconies was also unanimous. Both groups agreed that it would be better to have the balcony facing the street next to the living room or next to the kitchen/dining room. Siza agreed to review the plan in order to increase the area of the living room and the entrance hallway but argued the position of the balconies facing the courtyard side was a better solution. To support the latter decision Siza argued that the balconies facing the courtyard would yield more privacy, less noise, odours, and nuisances and would offer the possibility to dry the laundry and even prepare food¹⁸. Eventually, whenever structurally possible and conceptually plausible, the final layout of the dwellings accommodated most of the feedback of the residents. According to Dorien Boasson, “this way of working gave residents the opportunity to think actively about the plan, and to make reasoned changes to it.” Further, she argues, with this initiative “the involvement in the construction plan has significantly increased” (Boasson, 1988)¹⁹.

In fact, as mentioned above, the final version of the dwelling’s layout designed by Siza, would be noticeably based on the decisions made in the ROL workshop with the participants. An important development was the introduction of sliding doors to allow several possibilities of spatial articulation between the kitchen, the living room and the hallway. This flexibility was instrumental to create a layout that could accommodate the different lifestyles of the future users, as well as their diverse cultural, religious and even ethnic background. To be sure, Siza contends that he struggled to avoid a culture-specific solution in the design of the dwellings, as that would increase the latent ethnic tension. The Schilderswijk, Siza claimed, “is a very interesting, fascinating milieu. But there are here and there signs of racism. It’s just difficult that all these people blend together so suddenly. It takes time to emerge from it a great community. Hence, conflicts are inevitable” (Franke & Wensch, 1990, p. 1490). Siza identifies in this potential conflictive setting a major disciplinary challenge: How to design houses that are suitable for families with such different cultural backgrounds and diverse lifestyles? From his experience with participatory meetings in the Schilderswijk, Siza reports:

When I talked with the Dutch, they said: ‘Muslims are terrible, they hang curtains on the windows. One thinks about that, and then you hear: ‘Dutch families are terrible, they have such small bathrooms, and facing directly to the hall; we want large bathrooms in the bedroom area’. For them it is (a religious) tradition, to withdraw for washing. The whole point was to design apartments where all of them could meet these requirements. This led to lengthy discussions with stake-holders; (…) We ended up with innovative dwellings; well, not innovative, but the special thing about them is that there is a double distribution, which can be divided by sliding doors, and give greater privacy from the bedroom area to the living room (Franke & Wensch, 1990, p. 1490).

In 1994, six years after finishing the construction of the Punt en Komma buildings, Siza gave an interview to Ruud Ridderhof where he pointed out his design strategy to tackle the problem of accommodating cultural heterogeneity. In Punt en Komma “we had expressly tried not to build special homes (for that was one of the ideas: to build special homes for Muslims)” (Ridderhof, 1994, pp. 40-41) However, Siza understood this discrimination would not work. “It was a very bad idea; the houses had to be the same, we had to find a house that satisfied everyone”, he declared. This strategy proved to be fruitful. “Ultimately,” Siza explains, “the consequence was that the elements added to the interior — such as the extra central space with sliding doors — were very well accepted by Dutch families”.