Culture & Humanitarian
citizen architect
From
the poorest Alabama county to a Pennsylvania farm to a Nicaraguan village,
young architects are learning that everyone deserves good design whether
rich or poor.
As part of a social movement called asset-based design, college students and
recent graduates live and work in low-income rural communities, drawing on
their elite training and education to design and build affordable housing
using donated and discarded local materials. Creativity is the name of the
game:
• Pieces of glass bottles sunk in cement make for cheap colorful floors.
• Telephone poles work as stilts to lift a house out of a flood plain.
• Old tires support an outside staircase and shingles are cut from wooden
shipping crates.
This is not an exercise in noblesse oblige; rather, the activist architects
come to listen and learn about the basic needs of the community before
putting any plan to paper. They work with local housing and welfare agencies
or with farmers to replace dirty, cramped dormitories for migrant workers
with more humane shelter. Both architect and client build the designs
together. All projects depend on private or government grants, which the
young architects also must learn to obtain.
“Most people don’t think of the work of architects as relevant to their
lives, something that can help them, but we are now seeing architects
reinvent the scope of their work,” said Bryan Bell, founder and executive
director of Design Corps, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina
that, along with AmeriCorps, has trained 28 architectural interns in
community development projects in five states. “We are proactively engaging
major issues such as health care, education, and even immigration and
employment that most people would not think have anything to do with
architecture.”
Good Deeds Good Design
Design Corps began redesigning substandard migrant worker housing in
several vegetable growing areas. Florida, in particular, experienced a
severe shortage of migrant housing because of the 2004 hurricane season.
Design Corps’ solution is to use sleek, high-quality manufactured homes,
which can withstand gale-force winds. The farmers need the housing to
attract workers and the workers need to live somewhere cheap; both groups
benefit. Farmers must agree to certain conditions before Design Corps will
build for them. “Instead of trying to rewrite migrant housing law, we just
do strategic strikes,” Bell said in an article in
Metropolis
Magazine. “Like in South Carolina, one of the farmers had used bunk
beds. Now some 48-year-old farm worker shouldn’t have to climb up into a
bunk bed. So we put in our lien, ‘No bunk beds.’”
As Bell was starting Design Corps, two Auburn University architecture
professors, Dennis K. Ruth and the late Samuel Mockbee, began
Rural Studio. This community-based
architectural program sends its students to build low-cost houses in Hale
County, where Depression-era photographer
Walker Evans made
its citizens famous as the face of American poverty. Today the county has a
per capita income of only $12,000 a year.
Dallas philanthropist Deedi Rose met
Mockbee when she hired
him to design her Texas ranch house. “He was a great architect who
understood how buildings relate to the land and he knew how to build
frugally using local materials,” Rose said. Today, through her friendship
with Bell, she supports Design Corps’ mission to raise the social conscience
of the next generation of American architects.
“They have to figure out creative, affordable solutions. Maybe it’s using
old tires or second-hand windows, whatever they can find locally,” Rose
said. “It’s about teaching them to listen to their clients and help them
solve problems. They’re learning not only how to be a good architect, but
also how to be a good person.”
World Studio
Design Corps has joined with
BaSIC Initiative, which stands for Building Sustainable Communities, to
expand its services to other countries. Architecture professor
Sergio
Palleroni founded BaSIC Initiative in 1993; since then, he and his
architecture students have built schools, clinics, and houses from Mexico to
Africa to the state of Washington. This summer both programs sponsored
Nicaragua Studio. Students from the fields of architecture, landscape
architecture, construction management, engineering, agriculture, and
forestry designed a master plan for a new village on the site of a former
coffee plantation. As with the U.S. projects, the students used local
materials and worked closely with the community.
“The key is to get students to see problems through the eyes of our
clients,” said Palleroni, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin
and is the author of Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global
Communities.
Asset-based design is helping change the image of architecture as elitist.
Only 2 percent of the American public can afford an architect, according to
Bell. Design should not be about added costs, he said, but about the most
efficient use of resources. He highlights the example of one of his teams
that used the local red mud in a town to build a community chapel.
“We’re making stone soup. Maybe nobody in the community can afford soup, but
by being an activist designer, we can find a little here and there,
something that a community already has, and we end up with a feast for
everyone, even in the poorest of locations,” Bell said.
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