Architecture for Humanity

Please support Architecture for Humanity in their efforts to help rebuild Haiti.

Here is part of their long term plan:

For those of us who are part of the reconstruction effort, we need to think about immediate needs for shelter while planning for the next three to five years of rebuilding.
When we are rebuilding, do not let the media set the time line and expectations for reconstruction. I remember vividly well known news personalities standing on the rubble of homes in the lower ninth proclaiming that 'this time next year we will see families back home.' Some well meaning NGOs, who usually have little building experience, are even worse -- 'we'll have 25,000 Haitians back home if you donate today.' In reality, here is what it really looks like:

- Pre-Planning Assessments and Damage Analysis (underway, will run for a year)
- Establish Community Resource Center and Reconstruction Studio (Week 6 to Month 3)
- Sorting Out Land Tenure and Building Ownership (Month 6 to Year 5)
- Transitional Shelters, Health Clinics and Community Structures (Month 6 to Year 2)
- Schools, Hospitals and Civic Structures (Month 9 to Year 3)
- Permanent Housing (Year 1 to Year 5)

As for a long term plan, our team is growing day by day and thanks to hundreds of individual donations we now have the resources to start enacting a long term reconstruction initiative. The details are being fleshed out, but as here is our plan (so far):

1. Set up Community Resource Centers to bring architecture and building services to folks on the ground. See below for more details.

2. Translate and distribute of our Rebuilding 101 Manual.The manual was originally developed after Hurricane Katrina and widely used in the rebuilding process.

3. Adapt, translate and distribute a Earthquake Resistant Housing Manual for local NGOs and community groups.

4. Provide Architectural and Construction professionals to develop and build community facilities inc. schools and medical centers

5. Train and Educate Incoming Volunteers in building safely and to emphasize the need for sustainable materials and construction techniques.

6. Complete the Youth Sports Facility and Disaster Recovery Center just north of Port au Prince that was developed in 2009.

7. Design, develop and implement community and civic structures for various clients and local community partners. This includes the reconstruction and building schools given the particular loss in structures.

Architecture without Rules

Paul Barker from the Times Online wrote an article about Architecture without rules that has criticized the effects oc city planning on cities. He writes:

"Urban planning has led to shoddiness, squalor and ugliness in our cities. Let’s throw away the rulebook and allow people to build where they want..."

Shots fired.

You know the funny thing is, whenever we let architects do their own thing on a mass level in cities, they almost always forget about the human scale. Or they come up with an abstract theory for a new human scale or try to completely revolutionize the parameters human scale. Need I remind the writer that Le Corbusier's influence on the International modernist style of architecture and planning that led to some of the most bland and unimaginative buildings ever built that often lacked context with it's surrounding environment. Le Corbusier's vision of "the city and the park" also helped create isolated office and residential towers that enforced the separation of land uses and limited the connectivity of people and urban places.

In the U.S. (the writer is from England) we have let many cities and architects do what they want. And the cities of Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Atlanta have all perfected Le Corbusier's plan to a tee and all of these five cities lack a central downtown and a sense of place.

Now this is not to knock all architects who which to plan the urban landscape. There have been many architects who have done great jobs in creating buildings to human scale and creating great master planned communities.

But back to the article. Barker's main point is that the conservation of rural land outside of English cities has dramatically risen housing prices in cities. He argues from a conservative standpoint that people should be allowed to build anywhere in the green pastures in suburbia that they like. Again I would like to point to the American cities of Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston to show him how great that has worked out.

What's your opinion? How do you feel about architecture without planning and development without boundaries?

CASTRUM - 2009

2A+P/A and A. Grasso - CASTRUM - 2009

In a cold, cold land...

The Mayor of the City decided to create a new settlement. He did not want to conceive just a city plan, but to reveal a new emotion, a new political vision. He loved to repeat a sentence "the city is too important to put it into the hands of the architects".

Many meetings and workshops with citizens were organized to decide how to go forward with this new project. The Mayor invited a famous urban planner to the workshop, who showed pictures and drawings of many urban models. People were always happy seeing pictures of public spaces, squares, courtyards, gardens etc... otherwise they were just a bit afraid - fearful of those projects made by the very famous masters, drawn by urban planners as "heroes".

But how to organize such a complex system? What form will the city be? This was the problem: can the desires of the community be shown black on white?

Projections

We got invited along to do some video mapping projections at a secret festival in the North East of England. The theme and logo of the party was the heart. We spent a couple of weeks in the studio creating the show which opened the party.

Obscura Mint Plaza Building Projection - 7 HD projectors over a 6,000 pixel plate

Architecture School - Ep 1 Part 1

This is a really good show that shows architectural students trying to bridge architecutral design with community wants and needs. After watching a few episodes of seeing these architects deal with the community you can really see the importance of needing a community planner.

Even though architects build spaces for people they may not be the best people to deal with the sensitivies of peoples needs. The built environment can often trump the dynamics of the social environment in their minds which can often lead to conflict and disapproval.

But this is a great show, that shows the challenges of building in the urban environment.

Tales of a City Planner

Why did you decide to become a city planner?

Recently I gave a presentation to a graduate class of future social workers about the rigors of community planning and organizing. Before I began explaining the current ins and outs of planning, I first explained why I choose planning as a career. You maybe surprised to know that many planners in planning offices do not have planning degrees. Whether it’s a good or bad thing to have people from various related fields giving different perspectives, I don’t know. Most people do not grow up dreaming to review development plans and organize monthly community meetings. As a kid, I was always fascinated by cities and always loved gazing at skylines. I had no clue of what a city planner did. I wanted to be an architect.

My dream of being an architect began with legos. Every year a group of architects would hold a design workshop with legos during Baltimore’s Artscape festival where I would help build castles, ships, towers, you name it. As I got older I volunteered with the local architects to help run the lego workshop. Those same architects gave me my first of many internships in high school, which led me to major in architecture at Temple University for two years. To come full circle now, I now review the architectural plans of those same architects as a planner who I met helping kids play with legos as a teen.

It was at Temple University that I grew a deep appreciation for cities. Temple was an urban campus right in the heart of inner-city Philadelphia. I was a kids from an inn-ring suburb and while I had visited Philadelphia dozens of times because my family was from there, I had never lived there. It was an eye opening experience. The big city allowed me to experience the new cultures and neighborhoods, the subway and el trains, lively and crowded downtown streets…and great poverty.

My University was in a neighborhood that had been in blight for over 50 years. In fact, the building my studio building was in was across the street from public housing. The studio space had the top floor in a nine story and from every direction that you looked past the campus, there was a mile or more of blighted neighborhoods. I really liked being in architecture, it was my dream. But studying how people feel and perceive space seemed trivial in the face of abject poverty that was in front of us. No matter how the spaces of the buildings of across the street where designed they were never going to feel safe.

I could not get past the fact that as future architects, if we are designing new and better spaces for people, how are we going to help the people in public housing across the street? When I asked my professor, “Who designs buildings for the poor?” The answer I got was, very few. Since architecture is still a business, there is no profit in building for the poor. Your future clients will be those with means (being individuals or institutions) and that’s who you will essentially work for.

This is not to say that all architects do is design buildings and spaces for the rich. As an intern for several architectural firms, I worked numerous public projects that would affect almost everyone from hospitals, schools, government buildings and for commercial projects intended for low income neighborhoods. Even if architects were to design pro bono for low income neighborhoods, at best all they could do is change the perception of how they felt about their neighborhoods. And while it is important for everyone to have a positive relationship about their environment, especially the poor, it is not going to bring jobs to their neighborhoods, it will not provide a better education, and it will not provide them with better skills or healthcare. Can a city planner do all these things? Probably not but at least we can educate people and help guide communities into a better direction.

So I left my major of understanding how people live and interact within their immediate spaces for a major that studies how people live and interact with their community. Both professions seek to improve the quality of how people experience their environment. The planner’s job is to help communities envision a better environment.

Well I hoped you enjoyed reading my “Johnny Do-Gooder” city planning story. Most city planners have similar tales of wanting to change their world. And while working for government can be slow and arduous, most of us still hold on to the belief that we can impact the world we live in. If you read my past tales of a city planner, then you know that changing the world I know is a lot harder then I thought. And in this line of work, it is very hard to measure any discernable success or to gauge how much of an impact you really have on your community. But all I can do is learn from the mistakes from the past so I can help plan a better tomorrow. And from these blog posts, I hope that any future planners can learn from my mistakes.

Thanks for reading!

Unfamiliar Skyline Series...The Caribbean

Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago

Kingston, Jamaica

Havana, Cuba

San Jaun, Puerto Rico

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

The lack of diversity in Architecture and Public Space

Architects have the awesome task of defining the spaces that we work and live in. The creation of this space can be for aesthetic beauty or for simple functionality. Architects can define space by light, shadow, color, massing, materials, repetition, objects and so on. Ultimately these spaces that Architects create that we all live in, reflect their culture or their clients' culture through space. These spaces help give us index clues on the values and mindset of the larger overall culture.

The spaces that have been created in America have often been very Euro-centric. While America boasts about it's ever increasing melting pot, the defining of space through an Afro-centric viewpoint has been absent from the stew. Moreover from race, studies have shown that women might perceive space differently then men, especially in dealing with conformability and safety. While women have made significant inroads in the male dominated profession of architecture, the percentage of licensed black architects is still at 2 percent. The percentage for black women in architecture is even more abysmal. Here is an excerpt from a story in Architect Online last year about the percentage of black women in architecture:

"First, the good news: The number of black women licensed to practice architecture in the United States has quadrupled over the past 15 years.The bad news? That number is still only 196."

By the article's percentage, black women only make up 0.02% of architects in America. So the question this blog poses is, How does the lack of diversity in architecture affect public spaces?Please comment and tell us your opinion.

Unfamilar Skyline Series...India

Mumbai, India

Mumbai, India

Delhi, India

Delhi, India

Calcutta, India

Calcutta, India

Hyderabad, India

Unfamiliar Skylines Series...Cities in Brazil

Belo Horizonte

Brazilia

Ceara

Goiania














Rio De Janeiro














Salvador














Sao Paulo

Unfamiliar Skylines Series...Cities in Africa

This will be the first of what will be a repeating series of skylines from around the world that are not as well known as their counterparts in the U.S., Eruope and the Asian Pacific.

This first series post will give a brief glampse to cities all across the continent of Africa. With increased dvelopment occuring in almost every region, African cities could be on the forefront of a building boom as seen in South eastern Asian cities within the last 15 years. Continued growth in African cities should provide interesting oppurtunies for architects and planners in the near future.

Check out these city skylines:

Abidigan, Ivory Coast













Cairo, Egypt















Capetown, South Africa













Durban, South Africa













Harare, Zimbabwe













Johannesburg, South Africa














Lagos, Nigeria

Maputo, Mozambique














Nairobi, Kenya













Port Louis, Mauritius














Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast