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The Commons: One-to-One #25 with Amro Sallam of Architects for Society

2016-05-31T13:22:00-04:00

Amro Sallam helped start Architects for Society in 2015, gathering together a collective of international architects to focus their work on humanitarian and social-welfare projects. One of their first projects, Hex House, is a solar-powered, single-family unit designed for deployment in refugee camps and other displaced communities. Sallam shared with me the firm’s origin story, their mindset towards architecture’s involvement in humanitarian efforts, and his thoughts on Aravena's Biennale.

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Shownotes:

Go Fund Me campaign for Hex House

Hex House:

Curator of MoMA's “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter" on palliative refugee architecture

2016-05-19T13:17:00-04:00

If we imagine one's escape to a refugee camp as fragmentary, provisional and incomplete, the camp must be transformed not only in design but also in its role as a catalyst for promoting the humanity of those living within its barbed-wired walls. [...] Architecture has become the litmus test of society's capacity for holistic and compassionate security.

For more on the architectural experience of refugees:

Barcelona's bold new plan to get cars off the road

2016-05-18T13:09:00-04:00

In the latest attempt from a big city to move away from car hegemony, Barcelona has ambitious plans. Currently faced with excessive pollution and noise levels, the city has come up with a new mobility plan to reduce traffic by 21%. And it comes with something extra: freeing up nearly 60% of streets currently used by cars to turn them into so-called “citizen spaces”.

"The plan is based around the idea of superilles (superblocks) – mini neighbourhoods around which traffic will flow, and in which spaces will be repurposed to “fill our city with life”, as its tagline says."

A precedent for Barcelona's superblocks was actually instituted in the city back in the late 19th century when Ildefons Cerdà planned Eixample, a district intended to free up the crowded medieval neighborhoods of the old city. With their famous beveled corners, Cerdà's large residential blocks were intended to serve as lungs for the city, with interior courtyards to provide greenery on a regular and frequent basis.

But urban development laid waste to Cerdà's carefully-laid plans. Today, the city loses about 3,500 citizens each year to air pollution.

The bold new plan comprises a series of interventions to create "superblocks" from nine of Cerdà's smaller blocks. The initiative starts with restricting vehicular traffic to primarily the perimeter streets.

City officials hope that by i...

Olafur Eliasson's 'Green Light' responds to the refugee crisis in Europe

2016-05-17T11:30:00-04:00

Green Light is an artistic workshops that responds to the current situation in Europe, in which countless refugees are caught up in legal and political limbo. Together with TBA21 in Vienna, Olafur Eliasson has invited people from different backgrounds – refugees and locals – to take part in exchanges at TBA21-Augarten through a playful, creative process.

Over the course of the three-month project, which ends 5 June, participants put together Green light lamp modules designed by Olafur Eliasson on two days of the week and take part in practical workshops and language courses on two other days. During that time, TBA21 is also hosting a multifaceted programme of shared learning that features workshops, seminars, performances, screenings, lectures, and artistic interventions.

“Green light is an act of welcoming, addressed both to those who have fled hardship and instability in their home countries and to the residents of Vienna. I hope Green light shines light on some of the challenges a...

Bay Area media ban together for homelessness advocacy

2016-05-16T13:01:00-04:00

Next month, media organizations in the Bay Area are planning to put aside their rivalries and competitive instincts for a day of coordinated coverage on the homeless crisis in the city. [...] “We want the full force of the Fourth Estate to bear down on this problem” [...] “You will not be able to log onto Facebook, turn on the radio, watch TV, read a newspaper, log onto Twitter without seeing a story about the causes and solutions to homelessness”

A fascinating effort in "solutions-oriented journalism", coordinating efforts across 30 media organizations to fully devote one day of coverage to the Bay Area's homelessness problem. While some organizations will report on the issue as they otherwise might, others will propose direct hypotheses for solving the problem, then investigate their potential efficacy.

Related on Archinect:

The self-segregation of America's wealthiest class

2016-05-12T13:16:00-04:00

For years now, people have been talking about the insulated world of the top 1 percent of Americans, but the top 20 percent of the income distribution is also steadily separating itself — by geography and by education as well as by income. This self-segregation of a privileged fifth of the population is changing the American social order and the American political system, creating a self-perpetuating class at the top, which is ever more difficult to break into.

"Geographic segregation dovetails with the growing economic spread between the top 20 percent and the bottom 80 percent: The top quintile is, in effect, disengaging from everyone with lower incomes."

In related news:

Kenya moves to shut down Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee camp

2016-05-11T18:25:00-04:00

Kenya has vowed to close the world’s biggest refugee camp within a year and send hundreds of thousands of Somalis back to their war-torn homeland or on to other countries, a plan decried by aid and human rights groups as dangerous, illegal and impractical. Kenya says it needs to close the sprawling Dadaab camp, home to 330,000 mostly Somali refugees, to protect the country’s security after a string of terror attacks by al-Shabaab.

With most of Europe and the Middle East grappling with an unprecedented refugee crisis, it's easy to lose sight of the millions of other displaced peoples around the world. But the largest population of refugees isn't in Germany, Sweden, or France.

Rather, with a population of 329,811 refugees, primarily Somali, the refugee camp complex in Dadaab, Kenya is the largest in the world. Now, the Kenyan government is moving to shut it down.

In related news:

This month Archinect is focusing on socially-aware projects as part of our special theme for May, Help. Have projects of your own that are oriented towards creating a more equitable and livable society? Submit to our open call before Sunday, May 22.

Are "Food Computers" the key to a more sustainable future of agriculture?

2016-05-11T14:00:00-04:00

That an apple can travel over 11,500 miles from where it was grown (spending over a year in shipment and in toxic, low-oxygen storage to suspend its maturation) is the perfect object lesson of our global agricultural system’s failures. [...] And with the advent of natural-resource scarcity, flattening yields, loss of biodiversity, changing climates, environmental degradation, and booming urban populations, we’re hurtling toward its natural limit.

"What if we could build a different world? One in which anyone could farm anywhere, not just on land devastated by disaster, but in basements, skyscrapers, and abandoned subway tunnels? Or in classrooms, rooftops, and old factories?"

In this article by Caleb Harper, the Director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at MIT, he criticizes the "snarled cats-cradle of crisscrossed strings between origin and destination, shipment and storage" that constitutes today's global agricultural system.

At the Open AG Initiative, they're experimenting with hi-tech but low-impact ways to produce food, such as the “Food Computer,” a "controlled environment agriculture platform." The platform utilizes robotic control systems and plant-sensing mechanisms to produce a "precisely calibrated environment for growth."

By utilizing thirty sensing points per plant, the group believes they're creating more of a dialogue with biological systems than the dominating tendencies of conventional architecture.

The Open ...

Why architects should get involved in local governance

2016-05-10T19:51:00-04:00

“Architecture is one of the most important things that we have to help communities shape themselves, both literally and figuratively,” Treviño says. “However, when we start talking about the leaders of the community, most often you have people without an architectural background.” As local leaders, architects can bring an objective, analytical perspective to the organizations that run their communities. And there’s already widespread interest among practitioners in making a difference.

This month, in line with the ideas behind the upcoming Venice Biennale, Archinect's coverage includes a special themed section, Help, featuring content that focuses on the social and political components of the discipline.

Here's some relevant coverage:

Have projects of your own that are oriented towards creating a more equitable and livable society? Submit to our open call before Sunday, May 22.

Meditating on the "Past Future Housing" of Los Angeles with Morgan Fisher and Karina Nimmerfall at the MAK Center

2016-05-10T13:56:00-04:00

“How can you morally and ethically justify in your own mind working on a project that would take people accustomed to living on the ground, of having their gardens, chickens, and their little animals in their yards, having space around them, having flowers, to live in these twenty-four thirteen-story-high buildings?” The architecture critic asks the architect – modeled after Richard Neutra – in a play by the artist Karina Nimmerfall, part of her installation with Morgan Fisher at the Garage Top at the MAK Center in Los Angeles.

Entitled Past Future Housing, the exhibit comprises a painting by Fisher paired with a bare-if-not-quite-minimalist installation by Nimmerfall that includes a video and the play, printed out and stapled. An accompanying exhibit text clarifies the intention of the work as a meditation on historical, optimistic visions for public housing in the city, with some look towards the “future” implied if not readily evident.

More specifically, the show revolves around tw...

New MoMA exhibition explores the architecture of displacement

2016-05-06T18:11:00-04:00

The architecture of forced displacement is the subject of “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter,” a forthcoming exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit will assemble work by architects, designers, and artists responding to the global refugee crisis. Curated by Sean Anderson, MoMA’s associate curator for architecture and design, with curatorial assistant Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, “Insecurities” will include works of design built to help alleviate suffering inside refugee camps.

↑ Interior of a Better Shelter prototype in Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Erbil, Iraq. (Image: Better Shelter, 2015)

America's first "climate refugees" head for higher ground

2016-05-03T13:33:00-04:00

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems. One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change.

"The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees."

Precisely determining who qualifies as a "climate refugee" is a notoriously difficult challenge. While the UN Refugee Agency estimates 22 million people were displaced by "disasters brought on by natural hazard events," evidence linking, for example, the civil war raging in Syria and Iraq with a prolonged drought would up that number.

In short, it's difficult to clearly isolate environmental factors, which tend to happen on large temporal and geographic scales, from sociopolitical causes of mass displacement, which are often more visible.

In any case, while a sizable chunk of the American government still doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, its citizens are already being displaced because of its effects....

Open Call for Submissions: "Help"

2016-04-27T13:56:00-04:00

Inspired by recent conversations concerning architecture's engagement in social and humanitarian issues, as well as "Reporting from the Front", Alejandro Aravena's theme for this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, Archinect is adopting the special editorial theme of "Help" for the month of May. The theme will focus on how architects and designers are helping imagine and build a more equitable society.

"More and more people in the planet are in search for a decent place to live and the conditions to achieve it are becoming tougher and tougher by the hour," Aravena states in his introduction of the Biennale's theme. "Any attempt to go beyond business as usual encounters huge resistance in the inertia of reality and any effort to tackle relevant issues has to overcome the increasing complexity of the world."

The world of humanitarian work is complex and fraught, and architecture has no easy answers. But, at the very least, the profession has a unique vantage point to help create envir...

"It’s about recognizing someone as existing": Photo exhibit depicts L.A.'s homelessness crisis

2016-01-19T11:30:00-05:00

Los Angeles-based designers Sofia Borges and Susan Nwankpa recently collaborated in a photo exhibition titled "HOME(less)". Currently at the University of Southern California, the exhibition spotlights L.A.'s ongoing homelessness crisis in an interestingly positive manner. Borges and Nwankpa took a moment with Archinect to give more details into their project.

Read the full Archinect feature here.

More about homelessness in L.A.:

LA's freeway system is becoming an increasingly crowded 'neighborhood' for the city's homeless

Low-income housing in Los Angeles: A look at the past, present and future

Los Angeles to declare homelessness in the city an 'emergency' and pledge $100 million

In Los Angeles, homelessness is becoming more visible