“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.

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>

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 20^th 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.

In the past two hundred years, the world has undergone rapid, drastic changes that have altered how we live.  With the Industrial Revolution came a focus on the factory rather than the human being.  This meant that the living conditions of the workers fell far below previous standards, forcing up to twenty people to live in a single room (Mumford 21).  Unsafe living conditions only continued with the continual growth of cities throughout the twentieth century.  The question that architects must consider is how do we address these growing populations?

In One Hundred Years of Humanitarian Design, Kate Stohr discusses the importance of architects’ involvement in disaster relief and redevelopment projects.  The question of whether architects should be involved in the processes at all seems to be one with a simple answer.  Yes.  If we can help others, why not?  It is a matter of finding the correct method and design strategy for each location and situation.  Each and every area in need of new or improved housing is unique, and there will most likely not be a single solution to such an immense and wide-reaching problem.  However, there are a few factors that seem to create positive, lasting results no matter what the situation.  Community involvement has proven to be one of the most effective tools when redesigning or redeveloping areas.  For example, in Puerto Rico in 1949, a “government resettlement and land redistribution plan…[was started, in which] families were free to design and build their own homes using any method that made sense” (Stohr 43-44).  This gave them the ability to create their own houses without being forced into accepting a design that does not relate to the context or their specific needs.

In contrast with community involvement is prefabricated design, something that in the post

1: Levittown Cape Cod Kit of Parts

World War II era was one of the most useful tools that planners throughout the world had at their disposal.  With both the influx of veterans returning from war as well as the massive amount of destruction throughout Europe and Japan, prefabricated, often Modernist structures were a logical building type to move away from the old, pre-war state of mind, and into a new era.  Levittowns

2: Levittown Cape Cod Constructed

sprouted up all over the world, from Long Island, NY to Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, France, and Israel (Stohr 46).  Pre fabricated housing such as Levittowns have not proved as useful for disaster relief situations, because often, even if the structure is a simple tent, it may not arrive on site early enough to make an immediate impact, nor will it provide much more than an extremely temporary solution to a permanent problem.

An additional necessity for a successful future for a project is ownership.  When squatters do not own their homes, they often lose the desire to rebuild or revitalize the existing structure since they live in constant fear of losing what they have.

3: 1978 to 2003 Adaptation of PREVI

This was addressed in PREVI, in Lima, Peru, because the new residents owned the homes and were encouraged to add to them as time and money allowed.  In fact, it was part of the project brief itself that the structures be easily added to.  This meant that they were invested in the future of their homes, and were free to make them into anything they wanted to.  The ability to adapt each home to the occupants specific needs creates a dynamic city with a variety of aesthetics that are each uniquely personal.  In this way, despite the standardized designs that each architect involved in PREVI created, each block no longer appears monotonous, but rather incredibly active, each house with its own character.

With the rise of NGO’s and aid organizations, architects have no excuse not to help those in need of well designed, sustainable homes.  We have the knowledge and skills to improve the living conditions of the immense percentage of our planet that currently lives in slums, yet somehow nothing is done about it.  Stohr’s article proves that between architects’ knowledge of building systems and planning, and the input of those in need of housing, relief and renewal projects can most certainly be successful.

1: http://starcraftcustombuilders.com/Architectural.Styles.Postwar.htm

2:http://invinciblearmor.blogspot.com/2010/08/cape-cod-original-levittown-house.html

Speed has always been a powerful word in the construction industry. It has paved the way for new technology, both low and high tech, cheap and expensive, low and high quality. Speed has also been key in shaping post disaster, post war, and rapidly developing areas. Prefabrication, historically has been the answer to these three great problems. That said, the innovative technology that many masterminds have come up with rarely sticks with prefabrication, unfortunately due mostly to cost.

The speed in construction came from a necessity to solve a problem. These problems throughout the ages have been as  varied as the solutions. The article 100 Years of Humanitarian Design catalogs the many prefabricated housing designs which made a mark on history. What it doesn’t catalog however is what can be called the final chapter, the slum dwelling. It is the culmination of all the different types prefabricated houses; including both good and bad qualities. As a lead up to this cumulative prefabricated housing typology, a background of its predecessors is in store.

To begin, an earthquake in the early 1900’s destroyed much of San Francisco. The answer to the housing lose problem was to supply its population with small prefabricated rentable wooden cottages. Worried about permanent squatters in the city’s parks, San Francisco set up a system where renters of the cottages would become owners if they moved them from the city’s parks onto a permanent lot. Several years later 5,343 of the original 5,610 had been relocated; solving multiple problems in one foul swoop.

Another example of prefabricated housing is the Sears house. These houses were available starting in 1908 and ending in 1940 and sold nearly 100,000 homes. These houses could be put up in about 90 days with around 30,000 parts delivered by train car. These models shined in both ease of constructability and quality of the end product. In addition these houses cost only a fraction of the average early to mid century home.

The last example of prefabricated house that will be covered was developed by futurist Buckminster Fuller called the Dymaxion House. Rethinking the conventional house which made “no structural advances in 5,000 years” Fuller designed a house which made efficient use of both materials and structure.This house although seemingly unrelated to the slums of today has one thing in common. The fact that it requires next to no maintenance (the outside of the Dymaxion House is clad in aluminum).

The slums of the world should be categorized as prefabrication in its most crude sense. As a way of further understanding this notion, consider what prefabrication means to the building; cheap, readily available materials, and easy to construct. This aligns almost directly with the dynamic assembly of a slum.

First, Most, if not all slum building materials are found materials; plywood, cinder-blocks, corrugated metal for example, making them both cheap and easy to obtain near and around slums. In addition, the construction of slums is done by the squatters  themselves, obviously this dictates them very easy to construct. To reiterate, the common slum dwelling is in essence the next chapter in cheap, disposable, movable, pseudo temporary housing, akin to a double wide trailer. The most important thing to note is that each and every new version of temporary housing typology was designed to solve a problem.

1) 100 Years of Humanitarian Design

2) Slums and Urbanization

3) PREVI-Lima