There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives. It is the duty of the powerful to minimize that risk as much as possible. “It was supposed to be innovation, but now we’re being told it was experimentation,” Papa Omotayo, a Lagos-based architect and friend of Adeyemi’s, said of the floating school a few days after the collapse. “The issue is, can you experiment in a community like [Makoko] [...] ?” — magazine.atavist.com
Kunlé Adeyemi's floating school was built in 2013 and collapsed in 2016. The structured was meant to served 100 elementary students in Makoko, a heavily populated slum on Lagos' waterfront. Classes were only held for about 4 months in the 3 years it stood.
Now two years later, Allyn Gaestel analyses the full story around the failed structure in her long-form piece titled "Things Fall Apart". The question is raised: is it ok to experiment with trial and error in marginalized communities?
Allyn Gaestel explains, "The project was a chimera composed of flawed and superficial ideas and curated by deflection, obfuscation, and overestimation." As the situation stands now money has been donated, however no decision has been reached on what to do next.
9 Comments
This is a dragging.
i am not surprised something like that collapsed after long neglect on the water. narrative of the reporting is good but that's about it.
It's the undertones-
"There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives."
Suggesting that if your situation is so intractable, you do not deserve nice things- or anyone attempting to provide you with nice things. This would apply to any number of civic architecture initiatives, projects, and programs globally.
There is also the matter that all this is tied to the architect. If the architect had not asked for business class tickets (poor form perhaps but irrelevant), if the architect had insisted that the space be occupied at all times the 3 years, if the architect had guaranteed maintenance.
Not doing anything would lead to no collapse either...at least NLÉ tried to do something for the community.
Why did it have to be on the water - to keep tigers from eating the kids? Ridiculous concept from day one (hyperbolic understatement). That's the issue here.
The entire community is built on the water...oh and tigers are Asian ;)
Apparently about 1/3 is on water, and another school (still functioning) is not.
I stand corrected, those Iwan Baan photographs made me think otherwise (not about the tigers though).
Clearly they don't teach detailing at OMA.
Conceptually it is a great project, and could have been much more if it was executed well. It also could have collapsed on top of a bunch of kids and killed them all, so there's that.
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