In architecture, countless constraints and conditions lead to design. Legislating Architecture refers to the power of the word. The specific constraints and conditions imposed by the word are known to planners and designers as building law, zoning law or building code and are accepted, or at best interpreted, as such. Can these constraints and conditions also be understood as tools of design rather than obstacles? Can planners and designers influence the definition of these constraints and conditions instead of being mere executors? Legislation is written by governments, ministries, and, increasingly, by ghostwriters such as law firms and business consultants. Switzerland has a strong culture of so-called consultative referendums—almost half of all referendums worldwide take place in Switzerland. In most cases, the referendums are based on proposals from the public sector, but any Swiss citizen can also put a public initiative to the vote. Shouldn’t we learn to understand and practice the participation of voters and the forms of this participation as a domain of design and thus as architecture? It is a matter of attitude, mediation, and enabling a competent decision to be taken. Referendums and public initiatives affect us as architects with everything that constitutes our activity, and as citizens and users.
In the autumn semester 2015, Arno Brandlhuber and Christopher Roth conducted a workshop at the Chair of Architecture and Design Christian Kerez at ETH Zurich. The students were asked to design public initiatives, and after a democratic election of six initiatives from the entire year’s course, they developed a campaign for each of them.
Topic 1: Should paying long-term rents by the public sector put to vote in the same way as public investments?
Topic 2: Do private project developments above a certain size have to be brought into an architectural competition and/or a referendum?
Topic 3: Does the partial revision of the BZO Zurich go far enough with regard to “qualitative densification?”
Topic 4: How to deal with unforeseen consequences and contradictions in the subsequent implementation of referendums?
Topic 5: How should the city/state manage its land reserves and to what extent should citizens be involved in decision-making processes?
Topic 6: How are collective interests negotiated and weighted against individual interests?