A habitable domestic space: Lucien Kroll and his participatory methods

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2022-2-11
Türkkul, Senem
Today, the house, its meaning, and its industrial production and construction is both an architectural and interdisciplinary issue. How the housing environments are shaped affects the inhabitants, and the meanings conveyed by the built environment are interpreted by them in various ways depending on social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. However, during the post-war period, the architects were appealed to the idea of mass-produced standardized housing in favor of low-cost and rapid construction to cover the housing shortage. A unifying approach in aspiration of functionality and mechanization resulted in vast landscapes of mass housing. On the one hand, the dwelling was perceived as a unique, individualistic expression of self-image and personalized meanings for its inhabitant varying from physical to cultural and social aspects, on the other, the standardized construction of the houses excluded the individuality from the creation process. Hence, a contradiction occurred between the inhabitants and their built environment as the decision-making process in constructing houses disregarded the inhabitants holding the most intimate knowledge about their domestic space. In this sense, the role of an architect and his/her chosen design methods became prominent as the decisive factors in the process of building housing environments. Some architects adopted a participatory approach to provide people with habitable domestic spaces, instead of well-calculated and standardized geometries. Among them, Lucien Kroll became an internationally recognized architect under favor of his design methods collaborating with the inhabitants. His architecture contained diversity and was tightly connected with landscape, while utilizing industrial elements in a way that allowed creativity, rather than monotonous repetition. Therefore, this study focuses on the domestic space in relation to inhabitants’ associated meanings and their social, cultural, and mental backgrounds, the importance of the inhabitants’ participation in the decision-making and actively building processes of domestic space, and Lucien Kroll as an architect who practiced and experimented on domestic spaces in collaboration with the users. It aims to understand Kroll’s design approach, especially in the matter of house and housing, and his architecture in relevance to the theories associated with the place, the built environment and the house through an interpretive study.

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Citation Formats
S. Türkkul, “A habitable domestic space: Lucien Kroll and his participatory methods,” M.Arch. - Master of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, 2022.