1978 Harvard Publication Series

Published by
Department of Architecture Graduate School of Design Harvard University Copyright 1978 by
Alexander C. Tzonis and Liane LeFaivre

A first version of this paper was written during our stay in the Institut d' Architecture et d'Urbanisme of Strasbourg in the fall of 1972 and has been published in Bauwelt (German) January ii, 1975 and in Forum (Dutch) No 3, February 1976. We would like to acknowledge our debt to Etienne de Cointet, Director of the Institut during this time who asked us to give an evening faculty seminar on this topic and for his support and hospitality.
The present text is part of a forthcoming book entitled: Avant Garde in Architecture since World War II. No attempt is made here to analyze the real impact of populism in architectural practice after its disappearance as a movement or of the reasons of its decline. This subject is reserved for a later section of the book.

By the end of the Second World War, the architectural profession seemed to have attained a state of relative equilibrium and peace. The long struggle, begun in the eighteenth century by a few visionary architects and theoreticians against the constraining tradition of orders, proportions and decoration had ended. The final triumph by avant-garde figures such as Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies and Gropius was universally acknowledged. Modernist architecture was "establishment," and polemics a thing of the past. The task that now lay ahead was the broad implementation of the new principles.
Yet, just over two decades later, at the end of the 1960's, architectural practice was the target of more criticism, invective and discredit than it had ever known before. For a time the stress was so great that total collapse seemed imminent.
The aim of this essay is to discuss whether these developments were the result of a structureless disintegration leading nowhere or whether there is a pattern underlying them.
A few criticisms were raised even in those early post war years of optimism. One of the first was that of Gordon Cullen in the May issue of Architectural Review of 1949. In an article on 'Outdoor Publicity' he criticised architects bypassing street advertising as a source of inspiration. Because, he wrote, this type of design had not been produced by 'professionals' and failed to conform with the 'universal visual order,' architects regarded it as a part of the general squalor of the sprawling metropolis, it's creator the public having lacked the basic training necessary for good design. Cullen called architects' attention to objects that had been avoided or shunned in the past in an 'act of gentilism reminiscent of the days when the designer ignored everything that did not fall into line with his own private taste.'
Cullen's article is accompanied by several drawings and photographs of American cityscapes that served to document the anomalies which were to confront the norms of official architecture. Neon signs creating a 'nightscape in suspended animation,' flashing lights: 'parking here' and 'open all night': this was 'Broadway: vulgar and vital.' It was obvious that Cullen was bowing to the authority whose design decisions, opposed to the architectural standard, had been labelled 'incongruous,' 'vulgar,' 'degrading' and 'destructive.' In Cullen's they were exemplary. It was not the anomalous design products that had to be transformed, he explained, but the principles of architecture that had to be adapted in order to meet the specifications of popular design. 'Publicity has to be accepted as available aid.' And the reason for this? A force that emanated from popular design, a 'vitality' that had to be preserved.
Architectural values had often undergone similar transformation in the past.. Objects that had been considered external to architecture proper had been assimilated, producing modifications in the idiom of the discipline and to varying degrees identity crises to practitioners.
The rustic cottage, the acqueduct, the silo, the steamship were relatively recent acquisitions and had shaken the old prototypes of the design profession. They had changed the norms of design, affected the form of the product and the methodology of production. These were changes that the profession had absorbed and survived.
In the opinion of Peter and Alison Smithson popular design did not pose a threat to design practice at all. To justify this view they invoked past cases of change and adaption in the practice. 'Gropius, they argued, wrote a book on grain silos, Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes, and Charlotte Perriand brought a new object to the office every morning; but today we collect ads.'
Others, however, were terrified. The scandal over the introduction of the idea of a 'sovereign' public in architecture might have further implications because it challenged the very existence of the profession.
Although Cullen and the Smithsons advocated nothing as extreme as this, their conclusions were rather open ended: "Let the public ex- press it's vulgarity, the public and it's vulgarity will improve to- gether."
But years later, it would be the turn of the 'public and it's publicity,' with all of it's 'incongruity,' to improve the architect: in his article 'Architecture and Popular Taste,' Douglas Haskel was in fact to defend the 'common' and 'ordinary' people accused by 'prestigious critics' of creating a dreary, corrupt, scornful, infantile and hopeless environment. "These people are attacked,"he would say,"for no other reason than the 'strangeness' or the 'novelty' of their creations." The situation as he saw it was not unlike that when the machine had been introduced into the practice of architecture. "Now the problem is...the adaptation...an era of popular mass consumption," he concluded.
Haskel's illustrations include not only Times Square but Disneyland and San Francisco Honky-Tonk. With the 'schmaltz' and 'prettiness' of popular taste, the 'make believe' of 'fairy tale buildings,' the 'false fronts,' high gables painted with daisies' and 'Santa Claus Villages, complete with Silent Night on the loudspeakers,' Haske1 enlarged the category of architecture. A splendid future was in store according to him, with 'new and different kinds of architectural places...reduced to the barest suggestion of scaffolding to support the real show that goes on...popular yet wonderfully abstract.'
Haskel thought he was beholding the triumph of the 'democratic wilderness.' Indeed, the impetus of the 'popular movement' was irresistab1e for a time. Even Tom Wolfe, the american journalist soon joined in enthusiastically. In his article 'Learning from Las Vegas' he compared Las Vegas to Versailles as 'the only two architecturally uniform cities in history.'
Very soon, Reyner Banham, acknowledging the popular disrespect of the architectural norms complained that "motels, super markets, bowling alleys, filling stations, hamburger stands, even private houses," which have been conceived through what he called 'emotional engineering,' had been missing from the exhibition under way at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City entitled Modern Architecture, USA. (2)
This "unexplored territory accounts for perhaps 95% of all buildings put up in the United States...We can no longer refer to such a fact as an exception to the rule." The products of "frank and p1easureab1e emotional engineering...do not answer a purely stylistic definitation of 'quality' but 'the quality involved is too big to be ignored.'"
Banham asked who the creators of the new architecture would be. "Who knows what they look like, or if they exist? ..Even those who seem to think they understand it, still admit how little they know." This question however was of great professional interest, for if a new need for the so called emotional engineering products was arising, then surely someone would be needed to fill that need. Concern began to stir in the hearts of many.
It was finally Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown who put these ideas into practice. They proposed as a design project to their students in the School of Architecture at Yale University a study of Las Vegas and an educational trip to the city was organized.(3)
They documented and analyzed Las Vegas in search of possibilities for future design products. Their efforts both shocked and intrigued. Their lectures and articles of the sixties were unique for the wit and for the acuity with which they exposed the abuses and contradictions
of functionalism and international style clearly showing the principles of a 'universal visual order' to be not only incoherent as a sys- tem but inconsistent with everyday reality. They most adamantly argued that functionalism and international style were unable to pro- vide an architecture acceptable to the general public because they refused to 'look downward...to the commonplace' and to 'the commercial vernacular' of the mass of people who were after all the real users of architecture.
In a subsequent study, focusing on Levittown, a development that combined commercial standards with a concern for user tastes, Venturi and Scott Brown found that the success of Levittown was based on its ability to cater above all the fantasies of its inhabitants, an ability lacking in functionalist and international style projects.
Unfortunately, their search was limited by their desire to find a new 'scale' and an appropriate system representation, a new norm able to contain the emerging anomalies. This led them back where they started from. The iconoclastic slogan "Las Vegas is to the strip what Rome was to the piazza" instead of challenging the theoretical foundations of traditional modernist architecture, merely fortified it by expand- ing it's repertory of visual styles. It shifted the focus from one architectural model object to another.
Because Venturi and Scott Brown insisted in approaching the architectural object as a purely visual or stylistic phenomenon, they succeeded in providing neither a deeper analysis of the meaning of norms in architecture, nor any insight into what a new theory of design might be. By praising the architectural aberrations of Las Vegas, they simply enclosed them within the boundaries of accepted architectural expression.
In a similar vein Philippe Boudon studied the Pessac housing project designed by Le Corbusier in the thirties. His book is an account
of the changes which the users put to original buildings. For Boudon the outcome is a happy combination of the point of view of architect and user. "La relation entre Ie charactere individuel au depart de certaines maisons et les alterations et transformations consecutive, met en evidence, transposee au niveau de l'ensemble du quartier, Ie caract ere fortement individualise de ce dernier. C'est un petit mond particulier -clos et ouvert -possedant une individualite, qu'il nous a ete donne d'etudier. Inversement, Ie fait que les maisons ou les zones les plus impersonnelles du quartier aient donne lieu a des al- terations beaucoup moins marquees, nous fait prendre conscience de ce qu'un habitat collectif, au lieu de susciter la reaction individuelle, risque de l'etouffer." (4)
Similar proposals for an 'open' or 'indeterminate' architecture had been provided during the late fifties and early sixties by several architects, in particular by the members of the Team X group. (5)
The attempts of this group were not so much aimed at coming to terms with phenomenon of the commercial strip as it was with the question of housing. As in the documented case of Pessac, these architects saw the solution in the creation of a so called 'double scale' architecture. (6) Decisions concerning the structure and service framework were to be taken by the architect. These decisions bound the user to a certain extent but he was in turn free to decide on such matters as the proportioning of his own living space and the determining of paths of general circulation and access to supplies. Within these constraints, the user was free to create an order all his own. The role of the architect was symbolically reduced in this fashion to a 'mini- mum structure' while that of the user was to increase proportionally.
A compromise between the idea of the universally applicable set of architectural norms and of the idea of user sovereignty proved impossible because of the difficulties involved in drawing the line between the jurisdiction of the architects and that of the user in a rigorous manner. A common element in the above cases was that the hypothesis of universal norms and the legitimacy of the institution of the architectural profession were undermined although no alternatives were put forth to take their place.
It was another group of young designers and planners who having broken away from the orthodoxy of the profession and working towards the creation of a fundamental social change, finally succeeded in providing a framework for a redefinition of the role of the architect. Whereas the strip had captured the imagination of Haske1, Banham, Venturi and Scott Brown, this group of apostate professional and stu- dent architects and planners turned their attention to the slum and the housing conditions of the poor. Architecture began to be seen not as a phenomenon of growth and change, but as one of injustice and decay.
Although the strip and the slum belonged to totally different worlds, both were stumbling blocks for the functionalism and international style theories of design. The slum, like the strip, cast doubt on the hypothesis of a universally desirable and socially good set of architectural norms.
As Venturi and Scott Brown had gone to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, those wanting to study the slum left schools and offices to experience life in Harlem New York, Mantua Philadelphia and the South End of Boston. This, they thought, would rid them of the 'professional fil- ter' which had been blurring their vision.
In 1963, a young American planner Chester Hartman made an issue of the great disparity between the needs of the poor and the norms implemented in their housing. "Physical factors alone have been stressed in the evaluation of housing conditions and in the planning for improved residential areas. Physical factors are important, but they have no invariant or 'objective' status and can only be understood in the light of their meaning for other people's lives ,which, in turn, is determined by social and cultural values." (7)

Hartmann claimed that the projected norms of the architect 'related to middle class values' instead of the 'working class orientations and life-styles' of the user. As a result, architects designed products that were neither 'meaningful' nor 'gratifying' to their users.
The trouble is that working class housing is designed 'for the worker, not by the worker' complained B. Brolin and J. Zeise1, a young architect working with a sociologist in an article published in 1968 by the Architectural Forum entitled 'Mass Housing: Social Research and Design.' The authors argued that: 'the official approach of architects to housing had a dehumanizing and degrading effect." While "unplanned housing built by the inhabitants themselves" expressed the social values of it's users, planned housing designed by professionals imposed 'new ways of life' on the inhabitants and these were dictated by the designers. Mass housing designed by professionals might be 'technically adequate ,'Brolin and Zeisel argued, ..much along the same lines as Hartman, "but it is nevertheless often 'socially inadequate' and 'culturally alien to it's users.'" It "puts up barriers to their way of life." Examples from allover the world were cited in the article of slum tenants who preferred their old and poorer dwellings to technologically superior housing conditions. Having pointed out these and other disservices of architecture Brolin and Zeisel proposed an alternative to the design decision process. They proposed to limit the power of the architects and to integrate the user in the conception of every plan. This was feasible as long as the operation involved the help of an applied sociologist they insisted however. His duty would be to intervene as arbitrator between user and designer, supplying information on the living pattern and 'latent social structure' of the future inhabitant. The sociologist would obtain his information 'by repeated observation and the use of other techniques surveying attitudes, informal interviewing, counting how often people do things.'
According to Brolin and Zeisel user needs could neither be understood through intuition nor satisfied through the blind application of arbitrary and standardized formulae. Therefore the intervention of a specialist taking the role of detached and impartial observer was in- dispensable in the design decision making process.
But, how could the sociologist remain detached and impartial if he was responsible to the sponsor of the plan, even in the case where the sponsor happened not to be the user of the product, as in the case of mass housing? Some other young architects and students proposed a solution. They were inspired by the advocacy movement in planning which required the planner to be an 'advocate' of the community where he worked instead of an outsider. The advocate planner was responsible to his client and sought only to express the user's views. The advocate architect produced his plans with the community. The people would become incorporated in this fashion into the design process to prevent infiltration of alien values. Part of the advocate designer's job was to present and explain his plans regularly to the users to insure that the desire of the users had been correctly met and properly implemented. Furthermore, he would present those plans to the sponsors or potential sponsors of the project and defend them as legal cases. Whether the sponsor was an entrepreneur or a government official, the main concern of the advocate designer was to defend the freedom of the user to decide on the final product of the design process.
At approximately the same time, a more extreme position was taken by a British architect, John Turner, who had been studying the barriadas in Lima Peru, a form of urban squatter settlement. (9) Although these result in slums that are really a 'health menace,' they offer a 'good fit' or 'response' to user needs. Up to this point, Turner's argument seems to coincide with the previous observation on advocacy design. But Turner went one step further. The freedom to shape one's own environment resulted not only in providing economic and social benefits, but also provided an 'existential value.' Whereas housing until then had been accepted as an 'object or a product,' he suggested that housing might be seen as a 'process which the users themselves must be free to manipulate through the support of institutionalized services.' Thus, self help design was seen not only as a means by which to achieve more satisfactory products, but also as a goal in itself. (10)
Another version of this idea was put forth by Herbert Gans, who found that the fundamental faults of the design process lay in it's total disregard for the opinion of the user and the method by which it imposed 'class norms and aspirations' of the architect onto the user. He offered a counter proposal whereby all users sharing the same 'norms and aspirations,' --in other words, all 'subcultures' or 'classes' --would be free to express their needs and demand satisfaction. (11) He argued that in an egalitarian democratic society, the design product must reflect the values of the user in a manner consistent with pluralistic principles, not only those of the elite.(12) A sufficient quantity of products for everyone must be provided along with a variety of qualities which correspond to the standards of each group and each user. As there are many standards of utility and different "tastes of beauty," there ought to be 'architecture and architects for each taste culture.'(13) It was undemocratic for an architect, according to Gans, to impose his point of view on the user because 'the architect is not a political representative and he is not accountable to any electorate or other constituency.' He had 'no right to decide (what) people ought to be' and the fact that the architect did just that made his action illegitimate.
Although Turner, like Gans and all those we have seen so far in our rapid survey of writings, present a certain degree of individuality in relation to one another, they are united by a common feature: discontent with the traditional role of the architect and with the structure of the design process in architecture. The proclaimed goal of what we shall call the populist movement was to transform the architectural profession, in response to new and steadily growing social issues.
The populists wished to cast aside the architectural practice based on visual and functional regimentation in favor of an activity centered around the needs of the individual user. The user was to become the official mentor, if not master, of the design decision. Whether these writers favoured the low brow and popular visual expression on the strip, or the implementation of user participation and self-help design in the slums, they urged in all cases that the design process should be carried out 'in the name of the people.'
Populism was widely criticized. The literature on this subject is extensive. Most criticism, however, was aimed at matters of implementation focusing on trouble points in the overall theory.
The major reservations were chiefly related to problems of conflict resolution:
I-What if the information available for each usergroup were not the same?
2-What if the bargaining between groups were not facilitated by the political process?
3-What if the willingness to cooperate were not equal for all parties concerned?
Populists responded by introducing more rigorous definitions into the design process and by adding the following functions to the designer's activities:
I-To generate and diffuse information concerning the satisfaction of user needs to all groups. (14)
2-To change or restore inequalities deriving from the existing political process and affect legislation act by techniques of persuasion and demonstration of size. (15)
3-To create a situation of arbitration over small issues between the various conflicting groups where the dissent is not extreme and then to gradually bring in the important issues where the major conflicts exist. (16)
The presuppositions behind the concepts used by populists however were never examined. It was difficult to open any debate on this subject as some populists went so far as to state that everything which was not 'down to earth' was an 'abstract,' 'ideological' ruling class en- deavor to mask reality. Given the complex problem facing the poor, plans premised on ideologies are...harmful to the specific interests of the poor, for they represent unreal, often misplaced, abstractions ...(17) Without realizing it populists had adopted a precise theoretical stand, as consistent and as determined as any previous movement in design. This is where populism draws it's coherence as a movement regardless of individual differences in emphasis and style among its proponents. These essential points of departure give to populism not only the coherence of a movement but also confine it within certain boundaries. We must trace these fundamental concepts in order to assess populism both as an alternative to the theories of the past and as a desirable approach for the future.
The functionalist theories to which the populists were so vehemently opposed had started taking shape during the period of the Englightenment through the writings of Lodoli, Laugier and through the visionary projects of Boulee and Ledoux. It was they who first introduced into architectural thinking the concepts of the humanly 'essential' and the universally 'necessary.' These two concepts were not unique to architecture. They became the tenets of what was gradually to take shape as the Welfare State approach not only in architecture but in other institutionalized professions such as medicine and education. The Welfare State approach to architecture reached its fullest expression with it's twentieth century heirs: Le Corbusier, the designers associated with the ClAM-group during the 1920 and 1930's, and the proponents of Functionalism and the International Style. The approach was based on a small number of general statements which characterized not only architecture, but, as has been already said, all of the professions affected by Welfare policy: first, there is a value system composed of 'common, identifically calibrated measures' or of 'interpersonally comparable cardinal utilities' according to which design objects were determined, and; secondly, a value system reflects inherent human needs dictated by human nature. As health became identified with a norm of hygiene and education with a norm of literacy, it was only natural that architecture should have its own essential, necessary and solid norms.
We could refer to the demand of Lodoli that 'in architettura tutto ha da nascere dal necessario' (18), or Laugier's statement "Les parties essentielles...(sont)...introduites par besoin.' (19) The goal of the Welfare State was to uplift the standard of health, education and general welfare related to architectural matters when and where found to be lacking. It was thus necessary to establish a series of norms defining minimum standards or levels, to objectively measure the gap between norm and actual state, and to appropriately compensate. Scientification in architecture, as well as in all the profeso10ns was necessary for the norms to be accurately and authoritatively defined and as effectively met as possible. The more Welfare State architects became obsessed with the rationality and verificability of their arguments, the more science seemed essential.
The "scientific" list of 'necessary essentials' related to architectural norms was short. Although a real consensus was never reached by architects, their proposals did not vary to a great extent. The documents of the 'Congres International d'Architecture Moderne', the writings of Le Corbusier, and of Gropius, the manifestoes of the modernists in the Soviet Union, the magazines or the curriculum of the Bauhaus and the other Avant Garde schools of the time, all attest to the fevered search by architects for scientific rigor and to their spectacular failure at reaching it. Whether these architects dealt with the organization of activities in the environment with the dimensions of built form or with spatial arrangements, they read very much like catalogues of 'necessary supplies' in times of war. The fact was that they were very much inspired by war studies. In addition, the List of Primary Forms of the International Style was reminiscent of an elementary geometry primer. This was because it was based on such primers.
Such simplemindedness combined with a few metaphysical abstractions were elevated to the status of universal theory by several notable welfare architects. To quote Carlyle's reference to Jeremy Benthams view of utilitarian man, half-truth now defined" the completedness of limited man." (20) Needs and perceptions that had been molded by history were henceforth considered as human nature and subject to rigorous scientific definition and satisfaction through enforced norms. Twentieth century architecture schools tended to divert their attention from historical considerations, preferring such courses as Anthropometrics and Visual Perception.
The welfare approach failed, for it neither succeeded in turning design into a rational process nor architecture into a science. It did however establish a belief system which legitimized the actions of the architect for a certain period and accommodated the economic system in which it was rooted. It helped the Welfare State to be, for a time, sound, rational, and collectively desirable. (21)

With the crisis of the Welfare State in the 1960's, new concepts were needed to revitalize and legitimize the role of the architect in the emerging economic reorganization, and to support the development of new economic trends. Welfare architectural theory came under attack and out of these gradually emerged counter proposals, all finally tending towards a coherent populist stand. Although populists aimed their criticism at welfare architectural theory as a pure theory of design independent of social considerations, their criticism was intimately related to the fact that as a belief system the Welfare architectural theory was beginning to lose it's credibility, it's capacity to manipulate the perception of reality in a manner consistent with the new direction of the economy.
The following sections of this paper will deal with the analysis of the fundamental concepts on which the populist movement is based and try to connect them to the historic conditions out of which they arose. We will first analyze the concept of the designer. Whether the populists embraced the strip as a visual ideal or the slum as a social cause, the major issue at stake was the desirability of the architect's role as the upholder of an apparently arbitrary set of
norms on the man made environment. In other words, the populists refused to conform any longer with the Welfare State related norms, as did his counterpart in education and health. The Welfare State designer, whether a planner or an architect, was an 'elitist' prejudiced by his own private theories against the taste of the 'user.' He was indignant when people wished to have fun and a bureaucrat oblivious to user needs. He was a peer-oriented professional imperialist. (22) Populists saw designers as a class: a class of experts who, because of a total occupational involvement with pure design or be- cause of their own middle class origins, had developed a private way of looking at the man made environment. In general, they saw designers as assuming the power to impose their views on the other classes unjustly. They were a class of professionals oppressing the class of laymen.
The populists also criticized the chain of command existing in the Welfare State architectural practice. If this chain of command had originally been implemented to distribute in the most efficient manner the greatest amount of utilities to the largest number of people, the realities hardly conformed to this ideal any more.
The 'bureaucratic' system was in all evidence socially inequitable and, from the populist point of view, the Welfare State was merely a structure which had allowed a 'professional elite' to 'do it's thing,' imposing opinions on other classes of people and frustrating the real needs of the user. The designer thus 'oppressed' the user by dictating the shape of his environment and by denying him the right to free self-expression.
The populist proposed several alternatives to the traditional 'pyramidal' design decision making process. A 'matrix organization' was developed to take its place. It was to be an organization within which conflict between architect and user, bureaucrat and activist,
elitist and layman might be resolved through an equalization of classes. (23) "It is not for the planners," said P. Davidoff in an article in the Journal of AlP, "to make the final decision in transforming the values into policy commitments. His role is to identify distribution of values among people, and how values are weighed against each other." (24)
With the populists then, the emphasis passed from an ideal, in architectural values, of 'order' and 'expertise' to one of 'freedom' and 'pluralism.' In order to implement these, the populists proposed to include, as we have already mentioned, conflict and arbitration within the design process: 'The fruit of this conflict...is that in extracting the city from preplanned control, men will become more fully in control of themselves and more aware of each other.' (25)
In general it can be said that while for the Welfare State the aim was to identify a common identically calibrated measure for all individuals in an ideally homogeneous society, for the populists the task became to create new models which represented individual differences, expressed subjective values and reflected the diversity of a truly democratic society. (26)
With the acceptance of such subjective and irreducible values, the project of identifying ideal plans for the man made environment, of applying them to design products was abandoned, and the scientific model of the design decision making process cast into doubt. Whether this criticism was correct or superficial will not be discussed at this time. The fact is that populists felt that this model of design had to be refuted and a new one developed in its place.
The populists' approach rests on the definition of the design decision making as a political process. As every design decision had in the past been a reflection of class values, in a truly democratic society the weight of every group's opinion must be equal and represented ~n' a pluralistic decision making process forming a 'vector sum' of all the collective points of view. To take only one point of view into account was for the populists a case of totalitarianism in architecture. (27)
For populists, the concept of designer and of the design decision-making process rested on a particular definition of "class". Populists opposed Welfare State architecture because class values of the user had been disregarded in the traditional design process in favor of those of the designer. Populists defined class on the basis of observable facts, according to the apparent 'norms and aspirations', to quote Herbert Gans, of each group of people --thus reducing class distinction almost to a matter of differing taste. This partial vision of the social organization led to hasty conclusions: The Welfare State designer infringed on the sacred rights of the user by imposing his opinions in such matters as color combination, furniture arrangement, room layout, window spacing and so forth and reduced the user to a position of dependence.

The selective amnesia with which populist writers overlooked the historical conditions which fostered these 'norms and aspirations' gave an autonomous status which otherwise might have been equivocal. Only by disregarding the history of these class-values were populists able to assert that they were the spontaneous expression of 'human nature.' (28)
Herbert Gans, in one vague allusion, accepts class 'norms and aspirations' as the result of economic and other conditions...responses to situations to which people (have had) to adapt (and which have been) internalized and have become behavior norms.' Therefore the satisfaction 'of these 'norms and aspirations' must be sought after since they had 'not proved to be socially or emotionally harmful.'
This historical analysis of the populists went no deeper and thus they proned as the right of every group and every 'class,' 'social' or 'cultural,' to freely express its values through the design of the built environment.
This stand on the part of the populists is, at best, naive. The bias resulting from the implicit acceptance of this positivist view of society was considerable. If class was defined solely on the basis of observable norms or values, then social 'oppression' could be equated to dependence in matters of consumption. But the study of the development of values of a social group shows them to be the outcome of the relationships of dependence of this group to the other groups.
This definition of 'norms and aspirations' rested exclusively with effects and led them to conclude that the acquisition of products by a group designed according to it's own norms and aspirations' altered its dependence on other groups or classes and eliminated 'oppression.'
But freedom of choice in matters of consumption does not guarantee the independence of a group, and the movement of the user-oriented design offered nothing but an illusory freedom. The disregard for the means of production in the determination of dependence in society and the exclusive reliance on the aspect of consumption characterize not only the view of the populists, but that of the designers of the Welfare State as well.
The definition of design as a scientific process and as a political process was equally limited. While Welfare State architects saw the designed environment as a well ordered regiment, populists envisaged it as well serviced supermarket. (29) People seemed to acquire from shelves what they needed, without control, supervision or bureaucracy. If only the cashier's desk were taken away from the entrance, Herbert Read once observed. This vision of reality was not only partial, detaching, as it tried to do the sector of consumption activities from the reality of production that determines the real dependencies behind that little cashier, but it also created a falsely optimistic vision of the function of design and of design products in the organization of power in society.
Let us, as the populists did, consider for a moment the satisfaction of utilitarian needs as paramount in the overall scheme of 'social change.' Let us suppose that our society is suddenly able to deliver enough design products to everyone. Why indeed would the cashier have to be retained? The major preoccupation in such an affluent society, to use the term of J.K. Galbraith, would be to match design products to the needs of each individual. But this situation would only change the distribution of design products in society and would leave intact the organization of domination and dependence. Populists assumed that the acquisition and the use of design products would satisfy the users because of 'utilities' in the products them- selves. The task of the designer was therefore to determine products that maximize these utilities. The assumption was that products gratify because of certain properties inherent to them corresponding to certain needs also inherent to human nature.
This concept of the design product was taken for granted both by the Welfare State designers and the populists. That different qualities seemed to be satisfactory at different times in history was somehow interpreted in both schools of thought as a phenomenon relating to the 'plasticity of human need.' But behind the reality of the 'plasticity of human needs.' the design product assumes a value which is dictated by the role it plays as a signifier of power. As a signifier of power, the value of the object is related to what it represents rather than to how it is made. The gratification it offers is not the result of a material property, but of the social function that it fills. What is pleasing in the object is not the object itself, but the social relation it signifies.
This view of the role of design products was put forth three hundred years ago by Claude Perrault, scholar, doctor and theoretician of architecture. Perrault saw that the value we assign to design products is dependent on a 'Connection which the Mind makes of two things of a different nature, for by the Connection, it comes to pass, that the Esteem where with the Mind is predisposed for some Things whose value it knows, insinuates an Esteem also for others...and insensible engages it to respect them alike. This Principle is the natural Foundation of Belief.' Perrault argued that architecture, functioning as a belief system resembles the 'Things in Fashion or the Ways of Speaking used at Court.' These forms were respected because of the 'Regard we have for their Merit and good Graces of the Court.'
But with the exception of Perrault's shrewd analysis. design theory has bypassed this kind of investigation and has taken for granted that the design product is desirable because of a gratifying faculty contained by it. In other words, it has considered only the fetichistic quality of the design object which masks the human relationship of domination and dependence behind it. In this manner, the structure of dependencies has remained hidden behind the phenomenon of possession.
Even a superabundant supply of custom-made design products cannot create equality of power. The real organization of power and dependence in society is concealed in the 'code' which uses design products as it's 'medium.' In this code, social inequalities relate to the possession of consumer goods. (31) An alteration at the level of this code does not automatically lead to a corresponding change in the distribution of power in society.
The model of design as an autonomous political process assuring the 'liberation' of the user through a direct participation in the design process, rests on the idea of the design product as a source of social power and on the hypothesis that values are autonomous from the overall development of the social organization.
Arising in opposition to the tendency of the Welfare State planner and architect to dominate the user, populism tended towards a counter- approach of 'liberation' for the user through self-help design.
However, even with the most 'user oriented' and 'self help' project, the user is bound to a relationship of dependence. This relationship becomes apparent when the user realizes that he does not possess the materials and the resources necessary to build his design object and that he lacks the economic power to obtain them. The user will have to face the realities of the status of the consumer, be it only of raw materials, and will be forced to accept a status of dependence in the production sector where he will have to acquire the renumeration by which he will be able to consume and acquire the needed material and then 'create.' Even more, his dependence on the production sector will increase as a 'free' consumer, his desire to consume will be intensified. Thus, the liberation for the user demanded by the populists is restricted and cannot be accepted in a sense of a universal condition of liberation, since it could lead to a heavier underlying state of dependence for the user.
Populism can be viewed simply as a movement which responded to a new economic framework. But, in addition, it pointed out the basic short- comings, the Welfare State approach, attacked the totalitarian fetishistic nature of the 'norm' in the design object, the authoritarian treatment of the user by the architect and the wastefulness of the Ivelfare State bureaucratic structure. Populists succeeded in demystifying the 'scientific' discourse of the architects of the Welfare State by proving to be arbitrary, with 'little impact on the behavioral patterns...of people,' a response of the elite group in society to the 'threat which...immigrants, and urban industrial society generally represented to the social, cultural and political dominance' which they had joyed before. (32)
The Welfare State approach to design can also be seen as a response to a certain economic situation. It adapted to a developing industrial society a population which was of agricultural principally origin (changing the mentality of pre-rational man of the pre-market economy into the rationality of production in a market economy) and transformed an existing population of pauperized urban proletariat into consumers.

In both cases, the Welfare State responded to changing conditions in the socio-economic system: the advancement of technology which was to revolutionize production, the intensified level of capital accumulation and the dangers of social upheavals in a concentrated mass of dependent urban populations. To meet these new conditions and the constant demand for accumulation of power into tighter concentrations, the Welfare State took upon itself the following tasks: integration of all groups into the economic system with high characteristics of stability and the expansion of consumption sector of the economy.
Thus, the Welfare State abandoned the early policies of enforced domination through the limitations of income for the dependent group because, to quote Frederic Eden in the 18th century, 'the only thing that can render the labouring man industrious is a moderate quantity of money.' The Welfare State thus accepted a new mode of socio- economic organization, one which permitted through higher compensations the increased distribution of property to 'labourers'. (33) It was thought that this new organization would place the working class not in the old 'abject or service condition,' but in a state of 'easy and liberal dependence.' The distribution of more goods, among which were design products, services and compensating income distributed by the Welfare State outside the wage system of private entrepreneurship, was made possible in part through the anticipation of a new reorganized socio-economic system, characterized by more stability and a restructuring of power into smaller and tighter concentrations. Thus the distribution of 'bonuses' by the Welfare State tended to be more normative in aim than philanthropic.
It was this normative goal of the Welfare State, the preparation of an economic, social cultural base necessary for a new economic organization which gave to the Welfare State architects and designers their common identity and their techniques.
That populism had a liberating effect there can be no doubt. It man- aged to foil in many cases an arbitrary, authoritarian and wasteful regimentation of objects and people. But in the process, it also bleakened the prospects in our society for architectural policies beneficial for the general interest, offering nothing in their place but freedom in a design supermarket and an increasingly fragmented and privatized world.

NOTES
1 Douglas Haskel, "Architecture and Popular Taste"
Architectural Forum, August 1958.
2 Reyner Banham, "The Missing Motel," The Listener, August 15th,
1965.
3 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,
1966; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, "Learning from Las Vegas"
Architectural Forum, March,1968.
4 Philippe Boudon, Pessac de Le Corbusier, 1969.
5 Team X, Report published in Architectural Design, December 1962.
Also several articles published in this Forum during the period ex- tending from 1958 to 1962.
6 See N.J. Habraken, Supports: an alternative to Mass Housing, 1972. Dutch edition 1961. "A support structure,' he wrote 'is quite different matter from the skeleton construction of a large building, although to the superficial spectator there may appear to be similarities...The more variety housing can assume, the better...'
7 Chester Hartman, "Social values and Housing Orientations,"
Journal of Social Issues, April 1963, vol. XIX, no. 2.
8 P. Davidoff, "Advocacy and pluralism in Planning," Journal of the
American Institute of Planners, vol. XXXI, no. 4, November 1965,
p. 331-338.
9 John Turner, "The squatter Settlement; an architecture that works," Architectural Design, vol. 38, August 1968.
10 John Turner, 1971, unpublished paper given at the Centre Intercultural de Documentation Cuernevaca, Mexico and J. Turner and
R. Fichter, Freedom to Build, New York, London 1972. See also the experience of Hassan Fathy, Gourna a Tale of two Villages, Caira 1969.
11 Herbert Gans, "Poverty and Culture," In H. Gans, People and Plans, 1972.
12 H. Gans, "The Balanced Community," Journal of the American Institute of Planners. XXVII, no. 3,1969 and H. Gans, op. cit. Preface,
p. XII.
13 H. Gans, Some Observations, 1972.
14 'The power to conceptualize is a power to manipulate,' Lisa Peattie, "Reflections on Advocacy Planning," Journal of the American Institute of Planner, March 1968. For the developed techniques of decision making which take into account differences in the amount of information available to the participants and their attitude with regard to cooperation see; Isard W. Smith TE et al, General Theory, Social, Political, Economic and Regional, 1969.
15 See George Burke, "Citizen Participation Strategies," The Journal of the American Institute of Planner, September 1968.
16 See Francis Priven, Proceedings of National Conference on Advocacy Planning and Pluralist Planning, Urban Research Center, Hunter College and Lisa Peattie, op. cit. for further details. For a comparative evaluation of models related to the case of advocacy planning see Earl M. Bleecher, Advocacy Planning for Urban Development, 1971. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Understanding, gives a very interesting description of the 'professionalization' of the rights of a class. The professional formulates values to finally propagate his own interests and not those of the class he is representing. On the contradiction between the designer and the user, of the design's class is not the same as that of the user: see "Advocacy Planning ,'' Progressive Architecture, September 1968. On the size of groups as a factor in the process of bargaining and arbitration, see J. M. Buchanan, The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, 1968, and also
M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 1965. Problems also arise where it is impossible to develop 'pure and homogenious groups.
17 Marshall Kaplan, I' Advocacy Urban Planning," Social Welfare Forum, 1968.
18 Published in F. Milizia, Arte di vedere nelle belle arti del disegno, 1781.
19 M. A. Laugier, Essai sur l'Architecture, 1753.
20 Quoted by John Stuart Mill, Bentham, London and Westminster I Review, August, 1838.
21 An accurate description of the gradual genesis of the welfare approach in architecture and it's concepts will not be found in the writings of the Modernist architects such as Gropius and Le Corbusier who claimed it as being 'all there own,' but instead in Cesar Daly's Revue Generale de l'Architecture et des Travaux Publics during the years between 1847 and 1870. See especially the VIth volume, 1845-46 and the articles on Worker's Housing on the Struggle between workers and entrepreneurs by Perreymond, the debated about the Ecole de Beaux Arts de Paris, on the profession of the architect.
22 Herbert Gans, "Some Observations and Proposals on the Role of the Architect in Today's America," 1972. Unpublished paper delivered in New York, at a conference in the MOMA on architectural education in the USA.
23 See C. Argyris, "Today' s Problems with Tomorrow Organizations, I' Journal of Management Studies, vol. 4 no. 1.

24 P. Davidoff and T. A. Reiner, A. "Choice Theory of Planning," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 28, p. 108 1962. M. Reim, "Social Planning: The Search for Legitimacy," Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 35,1969.
25 Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, 1970.
26 K. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 1963. J. S. Minas and R. L. Ackoff, "Individual and Collective Value Judgement," in M. W. Shelly and G. L. Bruyan (eds) Human Judgement and Optima1ity, 1964; C. H. Coombs, A. Theory of Data, 1964.
27 A concept at least as old as Condorcet. See Essai sur 1a Constitution et 1es Functions des Assemb1ees Provincia1es, 1758. See also R. P. Wo1fee, The Poverty of Liberalism, 1968.
28 For an elegant demonstration of how values related to the built environment took shape in the mind of the french industrial working class of the 19th century. See M. G. Raymond, La Po!itique Pavi11ionaire, 1966.
29 George Woodcock, Herbert Read: The Stream and the Source, 1971.
30 Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des Cing Especes de Co1onnes, 1683. See also Wo1gang Herrmann, Claude Perrault and Alexander Tzonis, Towards a non Oppressive Environment, 1972, chapter on "Arbitrary Beauties of Perrault."
31 B. Bernstein and D. Henderson, "Social Class Differences in the Re1evence of Language to Socia1isation," Sociology, vol. 3,1969; and B. Bernstein, "Elaborated and Restricted Codes,'American Anthropo1ogist', vol. 66, no. 6, 1964; and Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, 1970.
32 Herbert Gans, The Goal Oriented Approach to Planning, 1958; 1958; People and Plans, 1972.
33 Sir Frederic Eden, The State of the Poor, 1797.
34 C. Rapkin, L. Winnick and D. Blank, Housing Market Analysis: A Study of Theory Method, 1952.
35 Indeed for several writers, especially theorists of organization, 'participation' has very different reason for being applied. 'Closely related to the issues of cooperation and protest absorption is that of participation in decision making. A long line of social psychological experiments in laboratory and field settings has emphasized the importance of participation as a positive factor in the acceptance of decision outcomes.' W. Gamson, "The Management of Discontent," in J. Thomas, W. Bennis: Management of Change and Conflict, 1972; see also L. Coch, J. French, "Overcoming Resistance to Change," in H. Proshansky, B. Seidenberg, Basic Studies in Social Psychology, 1965, and S. Verba, Small Groups and Political Behavior, 1961. For these authors, problems occur not so much out of the reality of the structure of power as out of the perception of it that different groups have. 'In trying to explain or control the behavior of people, we are not concerned with determing whether their interests are really in harmony or conf1ict...but how they perceive these interests. It is now a well established uniformity of organizational behavior that whenever groups of people occupy widely differing positions in a hierachy and carry out different activities, they are bound to see their interests as being different.' W. F. White, Models for Building and Changing Organization," Human Organization," vol. 26 no. 1-2, 1967.