Archinect - Features

America’s Public Housing is Burning, Fueled by Cold Indifference

2022-03-09T13:22:00-05:00

In early 2022, building fires at publicly-funded properties in the Bronx and Philadelphia claimed 29 lives. The facts and conditions surrounding the fires expose an ongoing failure by officials to provide and maintain a safe standard of housing for some of America's most vulnerable. However, the reactions by the same officials would suggest that a moment requiring urgent reforms in regulations, funding, and oversight is instead being met with indifference.

Tulane School of Architecture Graduates Reference Haiti's 2010 Earthquake to Address The Importance of Essential Infrastructure Design For Disaster Relief

2021-08-18T09:00:00-04:00

On August 15th, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. With news still unfolding, at the time of publication, over 1,400 people have been confirmed dead and over 6,000 injured. However, this isn't the first time a massive earthquake destroyed homes and impacted lives within the region. For this iteration of Archinect's Summer 2021 Thesis Review, we connected with B.Arch students Jorge Blandin & Joanne Engelhard. The duo from Tulane School of Architecture used their thesis project "A Developing Framework - Rethinking the Displacement Housing Crisis in Developing Countries" to explore how to approach essential infrastructure and affordable housing after a natural disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Blandin and Engelhard's thesis project question the excessiveness within architecture and the disparity between accessible and functional architecture that also fosters community development and equity. The duo explains, "The 2010 earthquake in Haiti damaged and destroyed 295,000...

A House of Cards: The Miami Condo Collapse Exposes a Dehumanized Mindset in the Built Environment

2021-08-17T08:00:00-04:00

On June 24th, 2021, the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Miami collapsed, killing 98 people. While the causes of the collapse are still under investigation, the building's history of structural deficiencies is likely to have played a part. The Champlain Towers collapse is only the latest in a series of fatal building catastrophes which could have been prevented with proper oversight. In their wake, the continuing deterioration of our buildings and infrastructure causes us to ask if the commodification of buildings as real estate, and exercises in wealth creation, has caused us to lose sight of architecture's primary role as shelter and habitat.

How Can Architecture Respond to the 1.5ºC Imperative?

2018-11-02T12:10:00-04:00

The recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change alters the discussion of architecture and environment. The report, released on October 11, is alarming. As the Guardian puts it “we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe, warns U.N.” Based on discussions from the IPCC meeting in Paris in 2016, a group of scientists reviewed and summarized thousands of relevant articles to assess the relative goals of 1.5 and 2ºC increase in global average temperature, from an 1850 baseline. It suggests that immediate action is needed—on reducing carbon emissions, on removing carbon from the atmosphere—to keep warming to 1.5ºC, and also warns that governments must begin preparing for social disruption from climate instability.

Cooking Sections Explains Their Efforts to Adapt to Changing Ecosystems Through Food and Architecture

2018-10-04T09:10:00-04:00

At low tide, a cluster of cages emerge from beneath the recessing waters of Loch Portree. The emptying water gives way to a rocky floor, and with the addition of cushions, the familiar infrastructure of oyster farming in aquaculture is elevated beyond a site for collection to a site of exchange. Facilitating this transformation are Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual of the London-based studio Cooking Sections, who have created this lightweight architectural installation to examine the changing nature of these waters due to historical forms of aquaculture, and to reimagine their potential future. At the installation, the duo leads a series of performative tastings showcasing the preparation of various bivalves and seaweeds to a group of Scottish locals from the Island of Skye. CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones is both performance project and a form of responsive eating—a model Schwabe and Fernández have developed as a possible method for adaptation to the precarious conditions of clim...

Rensselaer Students Develop a Disaster Architecture from Water Bottles and Shipping Materials

2018-07-11T10:20:00-04:00

A preliminary hypothesis: we are living in an era marked by a profusion of “crises” — some environmental, some sociopolitical, some economic, and most a mixture of all three. In turn, in architecture, particularly its academies, we are witnessing an attendant explosion of designs for shelters that endeavor to alleviate or solve such crises. After all, architecture is a discipline that often imagines itself capable of “problem-solving,” with shelter design as the go-to solution. By and large, these undeniably well-intentioned endeavors fail to take-off for any number of reasons: practicality, scalability, affordability, etc. But — to offer a secondary hypothesis — this may be the wrong metric through which to interpret and judge such pedagogical exercises. Rather, these projects can be read as if texts, wherein the mutable and muted meanings of terms like “crisis” and “architecture” — and their relations with each other — emerge from the shadows cast by their ubiquity.

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Emergency Shelter: Housing for the Age of Mass Displacement

2017-07-20T11:30:00-04:00

Today, forced displacement affects more people than any crisis or conflict. According to the UN, 65.3 million people, or one person in every 113, is now internally or externally displaced. The average time families remain in emergency accommodation is now 17 years, longer than the average US house buyer will stay in their home. No longer temporary but not yet a city, these ‘camps’ are where millions of children will grow up. In this month’s feature we speak to architects working with the concept of emergency shelter to find out how they are approaching the issue. An overview will be provided by former UNHCR official Kilian Kleinschmidt, now director of Switxboard, who will discuss where and how input from the design disciplines would be most welcomed.

Screen Print #49: "Bracket" ponders how architecture should respond in extreme times

2017-01-31T12:11:00-05:00

How can design be productive in chaotic times? In its latest release "At Extremes," the journal Bracket examines the role of architecture in a world in which "extreme" is constantly being redefined.

How Architects Can Help Nepal (And Learn From Past Disastrous Mistakes/Successes)

2015-04-30T18:20:00-04:00

April 25th’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal has razed entire villages, severely disrupted basic infrastructure, and is responsible for the loss of over 5,000 lives. According to The Guardian, the death toll may rise to as many 10,000 people. Unfortunately, in the wake of natural disasters, the architectural community has traditionally waited out the initial emergency phase before lending aid. The embarrassing response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, in which thousands of refugees sweltered in the Superdome for days without ready access to running water, prompted organizations including the AIA to revamp their emergency-response guidelines. Now, architects are encouraged to immediately respond to a disaster.

Architectures of the Disaster

2014-07-30T17:55:00-04:00

45.2 million people are currently displaced by conflict and persecution, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The number accords with the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees articulation of a refugee as: an individual who has fled their country “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” But, as their website admits, in the 63 years since the convention, the dynamics of displacement have radically changed. This definition of a refugee does not account for the millions of people currently displaced by natural disasters, droughts, desertification, sea level rise, population growth, or resource scarcity. Of course such ecological crises are also intricately enmeshed in sociopolitical conflicts, complicating attempts to redefine the refugee or to classify a new category of “climate refugees” or “environmental migrants.”

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The Pink Project

2007-12-03T07:25:00-05:00

While filming on a set in New Orleans, actor Brad Pitt became seduced by the powerful image of a pink-clad CGI house within the lush Louisiana surroundings. He saw the pink structure as a metaphor, representing the future of renewed housing for those displaced by the recent disasters.