Daily Archives: February 17, 2013

Architects?

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“Architecture is a process of giving form and pattern to the social life of the community.  Architecture is not an individual act performed by an artist – architect and charged with his emotions.  Building is a collective action.”  (Hannes Meyer, director of Bauhaus, 1928 to 1930)  I find this quote interesting because I think it implies a certain obligation which every Architect must fulfill in terms of designing for the well being of the human race, however the “emotional egotistic artist – architect” only puts himself before good design.  We, as aspiring architects, must realize how important our work becomes, and how many people are effected by our decisions.

The role of the architect is very dynamic and must be able to provide a service for a wide range of individuals on both side of the economic spectrum.  The Idea of designing with a utopian ideology isn’t realistic enough in order to solve some of the problems, which we face today.  In a perfect world where utopia is attainable and everything is perfect then these ideas would be fine.  However we live in a world that is far from perfect and utopia is just a place, which well-educated artistic architects can speak pedantically for hours everyday and not solve any real issues facing urban areas today.

So what is the architect to do to?  Can design solve issues in areas with an overwhelming plight in areas of extreme poverty?  I’m not sure of the answer to this question, however,  we can start by responding to the issues at hand and not hiding behind our theoretical ideas of the world.  Architects have more power than most people can understand, we must take advantage of our position in society in order to make a difference that impacts people as whole and not just certain individuals with exceptional socioeconomic status’s.

How The Architect Forgot Who Was Being Housed

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Housing the general populace is an important goal for successful communities and societies. History has shown numerous examples of architects, governments, non-government organizations and numerous other organizations attempting to provide housing for a general populace that does not have housing do to economic turmoil,  natural disaster, or war. Architects become part of this equations.

Architect have often proposed ideas and schemes to help house the public but often the architects fail because they have fallen into a trap of forgetting the human aspect of their solution. The architect approaches the issue in a far to literal sense and thus end up ignoring the more global aspect of their proposal.

What this means is that housing proposal are designed with specific needs. These criteria are of a certain square footage, a minimum number of amenities and the ability to cheaply house the masses that lack homes. What is forgotten is the people who occupy the spaces. Cost and speed of construction is prioritized over not simply aesthetic but over the way the space will impact and affect the occupants.

A perfect example of this is with the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis. It was a large urban housing project designed by Minoru Yamasaki and initial was met with success but quickly became a run down haven for crime and violence which led to its eventual abandonment and demolition. In this case the design did not take into consideration who the people being housed were. The fact that young children and many single mothers would be living here was forgotten. The fact that the living breathing occupant were imperfect humans was forgotten. This design flaw would lead to the project’s demise. Yamasaki would go on to say “I never thought that people could be so destructive.”

This statement shows how the architect’s failure of design was how they thought about the people. The people were forgotten and thus the project could never succeed. Housing was failing because the architect was thinking about the structure of the house and not the occupants.

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Hollenbeck, Charles. The Examiner. <http://www.examiner.com/article/what-it-looks-like-when-good-intentions-fail-pruitt-igoe>

 

PRIVA Neighborhood: An ARCHITECT’S Template For Development

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Reading Design Like You Give a Damn was eye opening, yet at the same time, made me somewhat dubious about the role of an architect. The statement that, “Over time, the worlds of relief and development became divorced from the worlds of architecture and design” is, in my opinion, very worrisome. (Stohr 34) While architects do of course play a great role in housing, in many cases of disaster relief and development work, architects aren’t the first profession that comes to mind as a resolver of such issues. “Some employed architects but most depended on engineers to design and oversee the construction of projects.” (Stohr 40) These readings cover many global issues, however one detail that caught my attention was the repeated discussion of the role of the architect. Reading about these topics almost makes one wonder about the structure of our architectural education curriculum. In many cases, architecture students focus on the design of a single building, often taking into consideration the ‘site’, in what one could argue quite a superficial way. Hannes Meyer’s self definition of architecture sums it up quite well, “Architecture is a process of giving form and pattern to the social life of the community. Architecture is not an individual act performed by an artist-architect and charged with his emotions. Building is a collective action.” (Stohr 36)

And unlike the overall tone of Design Like You Give a Damn, architects are very much involved with the process of experimental housing. PRIVA-Lima, for example, is an international collaboration between architects in order to “test the concept of low-rise high-density housing.” (Garcia 27) The perfectly designed neighborhood. While PRIVA is a strong concept in many ways, I think one of the most important key factors is the way it’s designed with expansion in mind. This means that the family can expand their home based on their ever changing needs. PRIVA sees this issue with housing where there is no room for expansion and essentially results in a decrease in value of the site. However with this designed neighborhood, families would be able to adapt their homes based on their needs. This being said, the master plan is designed so that these expansions never causes over crowding as the layout resists a higher density. The article outlines that there are three main strategies; a pedestrian axis through the neighborhood, network of plazas and pedestrian passages, and traffic separation. (Garcia 28) While it’s usually easy to be negative about these kinds of ‘utopic’ ideas of neighborhoods and housing, I feel that this is actually a very strong design. For example, the design of this neighborhood also takes into consideration that each location is unique, and therefore offers a variety of opportunities that should not be limited by strict zoning plans on the part of the designers. The article talks about how these individual locations can create moments for entrepreneurship, which would increase the economy of the neighborhood. (Garcia 30) The fascinating thing about this is that while PRIVA ‘designs’ for these opportunities, they are instances that naturally develop in informal cities all across the world; as seen in Lagos, Mumbai, etc. So PRIVA is essentially, one could argue, a designed slum, without the ‘negative’ properties of a slum.

It’s almost as though the plan of the PRIVA could be copy and pasted all across the world, before slums actually develop, almost like a template for ‘slum’ development — which at that point would have to be called something else and not a ‘slum’. Of course, that would be in an ideal world, and we definitely don’t live in an ideal world. Foreseeing such needs is not always possible. As Slums and Urbanization describes it, the three elements in an urban complex are the railroad, the factory, and the slums. However, the reading talks about how “‘Free competition’ alone determined location, without thought of the possibility of functional planning.” (Mumford 17) There was no authority in the planning of the factory placements, accounting for noise and pollution from factories and making an effort to locate housing in different locations. In most cases, a lot of the issues came with the lack of consideration for the general public when designing the railroads (which were designed by engineers, not architects) where the “movement of trains was more important than the human objects”. (Mumford 19) It goes back to Hannes Meyer’s definition of architecture making a difference for the community. And while the education of the architect may seem to focused on the artist-architect charged with emotions, it is the architect who essentially tries to find a solution for housing that considers the residents. Because while aid workers consider these issues as planning and policy, architects see it as a design challenge. (Stohr 34)

 

Works Cited

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Print.

Garcia-Huidobro, Fernando, Diego T. Torriti, and Nicolas Tugas. “The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI) Lima.” Architecture Design (2011): 26-31. Print.

Stohr, Kate. Design like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York, NY: Metropolis, 2006. Print.

Top-Down Towns

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When reading about the industrial residential arrangements and comparing them to the PREVI-Lima project, the idea of bottom-up versus top-down communities came to mind. In both cases, the places where the local residents lived were “planned” in a top-down mentality, a contrast to the bottom-up concepts of emergence as discussed previously. And yet, within the top-down structure of urban organization lies the ability of the people of Lima to complete the housing project after the original planners were unable to do so. What makes the PREVI-Lima project so much more successful and humane than the industrial towns of the 19th century?

One initial point of interest in the top-down urban plan of these two sets of residential projects is that of the grand scheme. In both cases, housing was a necessity and a problem that needed to be solved. With the industrial towns, however, the housing was an afterthought. As described by Lewis Mumford in the book Slums and Urbanization, the plan started with the idea of profit and how to maximize gains from the prime placement of industries and railroads, and then an attempt followed to try and place as many dwellings for as little a price as could be engineered in the leftover space. Even in the less-than-livable towns this planning scheme created, there were still the basic elements of town planning: building structure and (some) utilities, doors and (some) windows, streets, etc. But it is the shirking of these efforts to the last priority that leaves them in such a lacking condition.

For the PREVI-Lima project, it’s as if all these factors that failed in the 19th century industrial towns were flipped and corrected, and in such a way that residents of the unfinished plan were able to understand and incorporate their own residential development into the local economy and community. The top-down order here was that of resident first, with profits and business coming from within the created community. As described in “The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: The Making of a Neighbourhood,” “the PREVI experience demonstrates the importance of having a planning team with a comprehensive urban approach; since only with a complex and collective understanding of the urban phenomenon beyond the residential is it possible to create optimal strategies that enable its eventual users to continue the project’s development.” The top-down planning here felt it was important to include elements that keep the community alive and able to expand, as opposed to the strict, bare necessities of living provided by the industrial towns. These elements include the abilities for families to expand their houses, increase their income within the housing project, and the provision of purposeful pedestrian axis, traffic separation, and designated public spaces and plazas.

For top-down projects, as with any plan, those doing the planning and setting the wheels in motion have the greatest effect on the outcome of a project. With the PREVI-Lima project, its clear that with a comprehensive and purposeful design, a town can be created with enough momentum to even complete itself.

The role of architects

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When thinking about “architect”, it’s often linked to formal planning and projects with large amount of money invested. However, architects are also needed for those with low-income, especially after disasters. Architects take the responsibility to transform disaster into a chance for development. In Stohr’s article “100 years of humanitarian” he describes that the role of architects is in serving the needs of those who could least afford their services.

The Depression in America, two world wars and natural disasters all brought architects in 20th century to the point to rethink their role as architects when they pursuit the technology progress in “modern era”.   Shelters and affordable housing became the focus of some architects at first half of twentieth century. However, with the widely spread of these proposals in post war era, more problems were raised around the world, which made these design more like an utopian idea, rather than policies with possibility of implementation.

The role of architects then needed to solve the division between “top down” policies and the “bottom up” emergence. Architects should work as mediation connecting this gap. Government and planers treat the poor as “million” instead of the problems and abilities for each individual when they start a large-scale project from a planner’s perspective. It leads to the fact that some of the “top down” projects cannot actually go down to the construction, like the problem of Prouve’s project that the prefabricated concrete, which successfully solved European housing crisis, was hardly promoted in developing country Ghana. On the other hand, architect Fathy realized this division between top decision and practices on site, and developed the housing project in New Gourna, Egypt with sustainable building techniques and local traditional material. Rather than taking the idea of “apostles of prefab and mess production” without understanding of the poverty of Egypt, Fathy’s proposal returned to the “bottom up” emergence system that individuals used for a long time without government’s planning. He believed that “each family will inevitably make it into a living work of art.” Stohr mentioned Fathy’s definition for the role architects as a “personal consultant yielding his or her training to the aspiration of the home owner and to the demands of local construction methods and material.” The role of architects should be like catalyst and lubricant that can make “top down” projects go through and arrive to individual practices. At the same time, emergence of “bottom up” housing should under the regulated and proposed from an overall perspective.

Education of an architect won’t end after graduation from an architecture school with second-and-third-hand knowledge. It’s usually more important for architects to learn those first hand knowledge from the local. The role of an architect should not limit in a utopian idea of his or her own knowledge, but more social responsibility.