Design for the public, design with the public

Earlier this week I found myself in the most beautiful modern building in Europe, the Lisbon headquarters of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Earlier this week I found myself in the most beautiful modern building in Europe, the Lisbon headquarters of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Experimenta '09, the Lisbon design bienalle, enthusiastically took  up our proposal to run a bilateral version of our Action for Age Design Directions brief as part of their time-themed biennialle in September. This week six Portugese design students are starting work on the original brief, sponsored by Gulbenkian, that our five  British finalists tackled earlier in the year.

The headquarters, completed in 1969, is a masterpiece of horizontal orientation and lovely materiality; concrete and glass and wood and bronze and leather and massive commissioned artworks and glorious landscaped gardens. Plus a concert hall and one of the worlds greatest private art collections. Minor interventions and additions in the intervening years are virtually undetectable: it is rich and austere at the same time, the vision and handwrititng of singular professional sensibilities; unchanging, monumental, awesome; a magnificent gift from high powers to the people of Lisbon and the world.

To the people but not by them, not at all. How ironic that we should be down in one of the conference rooms engaged in an opposite act of design, a co-design masterclass on services to relieve the social isolation and loneliness of older people, led by thinkpublic!, and driven by the principle that a good design solution is one owned by all the members of the community that created it.

I want to say it's all design, but such an extreme contrast makes me wonder what possible connection there is between what the architects Pessoa, Cid and Athouguia did in the 1960s and what thinkpublic! do now.

Let's see what the Portugese and British kids come up with together at the workshops in September. It might be rich or austere,  but but I don't expect it to be unchanging, monumental or awesome.