Activist Architecture
Thomas Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, has been asked to write a series of "education" columns in Architecture Magazine. The first, to appear in the June 2006 issue, deals with the crucial issue of designing for "the billions of ill-housed people around the globe, who need our design skills and who have no direct way of paying for them" , and the connection to educating architecture and design students. My thanks to Tom Fisher for letting me present his column here.
One of the great missed opportunities we have as architects lies in serving the needs of the billions of ill-housed people around the globe, who need our design skills and who have no direct way of paying for them. That may seem like a noble, but unreachable goal in a profession not structured to meet such needs, but a large and growing number of architects, academics, and activists have begun to take this challenge seriously, engaging in a range of humble and very hard-headed projects. (www.onesmallproject.com) A few of the academics leading this movement include Wes Janz at Ball State, Tom Dutton at Miami University, Dan Pitera at Detroit Mercy, and Victoria Beach at Harvard. Some recent projects we’ve done at the University of Minnesota show the potential of this way of working.
Do the Right Thing and Money Follows
Adjunct faculty member, John Dwyer of Shelter Architecture (www.shelterarchitecture.com) recognized that global slum-dwellers most need access to electricity, clean water, and toilet and bathing facilities, and so he designed the “Clean Hub,” a 10- by 20-foot unit with a V-shape metal roof that collects rainwater, an adjustable array of 16 photovoltaic panels able to generate up to 2,640 watts of electricity, a reverse-osmosis water system that cleans water stored in a below-ground reservoir, showers and sinks whose grey water gets recycled back to the reservoir, and waterless, self-composting toilets. He is now working with McGough Construction (www.mcgough.com) to build a couple prototypes, which will later also serve as “green” construction trailers. Meanwhile, the World Bank, after seeing an article about this in the Utne Reader, called to say they have financing available for such projects. “The World Bank spends $15 billion a year on slum upgrades,” says Dwyer, “and for only $1 billion, we could build and deliver enough Clean Hubs to meet the UN’s Millennium Goal of improving 100 million slum-dwellers’ lives by 2020.”
Design with the Poorest in Mind
Cass Gilbert visiting professor and executive director of Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair, gave students 48 hours to design a laundry building for Kathy Everad and her granddaughter living in a FEMA trailer in Waveland, Mississippi. David Vilkama and Mark Lescher produced the winning scheme and they, along with a group of New York City firefighters, built the structure for Everad. (http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/programs/katrina/Spring_Break/index.htm) “She was crying through the whole construction," says Sinclair, “A lot of people down there expressed interest in living in this structure because of the poor conditions," adds Lescher. Sinclair also had students design a pier for a village in India separated from its school after the tsunami rerouted a river, and he gave students “a small peek at what it is like to be without a home-how difficult it is to live when it is a matter of survival," by having them find or buy materials for under $20, erect a structure on campus, and spend the night.
The Best Way to Find Work is to Volunteer
You don’t have to go to India to do this work; there’s plenty in your own backyard. Last semester, I co-taught a course with Virajita Singh that looked at homelessness in the Twin Cities. Our students spent a day as homeless people, designed props for people living on the streets, had homeless men in for reviews, redesigned a local homeless shelter, and envisioned a daytime drop-in center for the group Homeless Against Homelessness. Students in a simultaneous seminar researched what other cities have done, interviewed architects working on homeless issues, and gathered information on built projects. Meanwhile, a our teaching assistant, Rebecca Celis (http://activistarchitect.blogspot.com) completed a thesis on the redesign of homeless service systems, showing how new kinds of hybrid buildings – not currently allowed by code – could go a long way to housing a diverse homeless population. All of this work is being published as a book for use by a commission in the city charged with ending homelessness in ten years.If you want to join this movement, you might start with books such as Architecture for Humanity’s Design Like You Give a Damn, Bryan Bell’s Good Deeds, Good Design, and Sergio Palleroni and Cristina Merkelbach’s Studio at Large. And you might check out organizations like Public Architecture, directed by Minnesota grad John Cary. He has created a way for firms to do pro bono work with its 1% Solution program, directing “one percent of all architects' working hours to matters of public interest” (www.publicarchitecture.org) and enabling firms to serve the needs of non-profit agencies in the normal course of practice. Efforts such as Cary’s, Sinclair’s, and Dwyer’s may seem idealistic or impractical, but they are just the opposite: they solve real problems, practically. The truly idealistic and impractical course is our continuing to ignore what most of the world needs from us.