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”.
Encoding, Decoding
The working sessions at the ROL workshops contributed significantly for the successful outcome of the Punt en Komma’s design decision-making process. This working method created a medium for meaningful communication between designers and users. This was instrumental to avoid the alienating factor of using jargon in discussions on aesthetic principles, technical constraints, political agendas, and cultural idiosyncrasies. In effect, as Stuart Hall points out in his 1980 essay Encoding, decoding, “if no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption’” (Hall, 2007, p. 91)20. The participation of the stakeholders in the development of the layout for the dwelling of Punt en Komma reveals, then, a practice that goes beyond a mere empowerment of the users in design decision-making processes. It creates a platform where aesthetic communication can be conveyed through an actual spatial experience where the disciplinary codes can have a meaningful decoding as social practices. This process, however, is not linear. In the design process, there are different stages and moments with relative autonomy that, nevertheless, reproduce structures of power. Hall’s essay offers a sound theoretical framework to analyse the production and dissemination of messages, which can be valuable to discuss the case of citizens’ participation in design decision-making processes.
According to Stuart Hall, there are four linked but distinctive moments in the process of communication: production, circulation, distribution / consumption, and reproduction. Consumption, for Hall, is an indissoluble moment of the production process, and “the message-form is the necessary form of appearance of the event in its passage from source to receiver” (Hall, 2007, p. 92). He thus contends that “before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded” (Hall, 2007, p. 93).
I would thus suggest the working sessions at the ROL workshops, illustrates a successful attempt to translate the codes of the architecture discipline to the decoder-receiver. The communicative exchange is reciprocal, though not symmetrical. There is reciprocity, for example, in the way the architect, as an encoder-producer, benefits from the receiver’s understanding of the message; it constitutes a source for his continuous production, which eventually contributes to improve the process of consumption/reception. However, the positions at each end of the process, in this case the architect and the dweller, are not symmetrical or equivalent. As Stuart Hall highlights, there is no code with a transparent, or “natural” representation of the real. Hence, this inevitably sparks misunderstandings, or distorted communication, which creates discrepancies in the relation between encoder and decoder, thus resulting in three positions: the dominant-hegemonic, the negotiated, and the oppositional21.
CONCLUSION
The design decision-making process in deelgebied 5’s plan and