Photo: Kevin R. Horn

Next month marks a full year of work on the Tingo water system. In previous posts I described the process of site surveying and planning, and then how in late January we finally began construction.  Earlier this summer we finished the intake, sedimentation tank, and pump house, three structures which will, respectively, collect groundwater, clean it of sediment, and send it upwards to the community through 3,300 feet of stainless steel and high-grade-PVC piping. At the top of the mountain the water will gather in a storage tank and then flow down the other side of the slope through another set of pipes that connect to individual households. The piecemeal construction schedule – we built each segment of the system as time and logistics allowed – means that we have finished the first and last parts of the system – the intake and pump house and the distribution system – but have yet to lay stainless steel pipe to connect the water source to the community tank. In September we hope to do that.

As I write, a group of American engineers, recently arrived from Pittsburgh, work on the foundation and walls for the storage tank, which sits at the highest point in the village. They are the second group to visit this year from the nonprofit Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the organization that is responsible, along with engineering students from the University of Pittsburgh, for the design of the entire water system. Under their supervision this week we will pour concrete and bend rebar, and embed galvanized iron and PVC piping within the walls and floors of the tank. Read more…

There’s a well-worn architectural truism that goes something like this: “Good clients make good projects.” The idea is that a knowledgeable and demanding benefactor can push an architect beyond his normal limits. The inverse might assert that a complacent client makes for uninspired projects.

For some time now I’ve been wondering, to what extent does the relationship between designer and user contributes to the failing infrastructure here in rural Ecuador? Here’s the basic problem: The infrastructure, while designed scrupulously from the engineer’s point of view, be it schools, electric grids, or water systems takes little stock of the human needs or habits of the people it’s supposed to serve. This approach results in badly managed projects that break soon after they’re inaugurated, or which simply do not match the needs of the local population. Read more…

B3 volunteers in Tingo. Photo: Robert Gradoville.

By the end of February, 34 high school volunteers from the service group Builders Beyond Borders (B3) had completed one of four distribution loops for Tingo´s nascent water system. Over the course of six days, the students dug nearly 2,000 feet of ditches, then assembled and laid the high-pressure PVC piping that will eventually carry water to 30 houses scattered along the hillside. Designed by engineering students from the University of Pittsburgh—whose visit coincided with B3’s in order to direct the first stages of work—the distribution loops run from a concrete storage tank (yet to be built) at the highest point, a hill behind the community center, beside the village president’s house. The tank will be fed by an intake and pump house, 1,000 vertical feet below. An underground pipeline, dug out of sandy mountain soil, will connect the three structures. 

Each spring, the students from B3 travel somewhere in Central or South America, where they work on projects that will benefit that year´s host community. Two weeks ago, the first of two groups arrived in Guangaje to help with the early stages of the Tingo water project. Read more…

Several weeks ago the residents of Tingo built what is known locally as a chosa, a circular straw house of a type native to the high sierra, where long, resilient paramo grass grows abundantly. This particular chosa — framed in wood and tied with hand woven, straw rope —is enormous by local standards. While such vernacular architecture tends to be used in the service of tool sheds or detached kitchens, the Tingo building is intended as a community kitchen and dining hall. Its centerpiece, both in the sense of engineering and aesthetic drama, is a massive wooden pole, cut from a magnificent pine, harvested in the next town over. To bring it back to the village, 14 people labored for seven hours, using rope and muscle to drag the tree uphill to the closest road. Read more…

For most people in Guangaje — perhaps for most people in the Ecuadorian Sierra — the daily routines of domestic life orbit around an outdoor wash basin called a lavanderia: an open cistern for water storage, and two smooth concrete slabs on which clothes are scrubbed, dishes cleaned. In many places in the parish, where indoor piping is unheard of, the faucet that rises out of the concrete basin is the only source of water for each household. This means that the small tank and slab become the nexus for all the family’s cleaning and cooking — a sort of a low-tech, all-in-one sink, dishwasher, and washing machine. In the large parish town of Centro, however, the majority of households don’t have access to familial lavandarias and use, instead, one of eight public basins, arranged in a curving line that bisects the community and connects, eventually, to a water source just outside the town limits. I don’t know when those basins were built, but by the time I took a tour of the public lavandarias last month, they were in sorry state, many of them with faucets broken or pipes severed, little more than cracked slabs laid on the ground. Read more…

The wind has picked up here in the past two weeks. Along the road to Tingo, a small village close by in the highlands the gusts are strong enough that when I lean into them, they support my weight. The wind’s speed is just about double what it was in the recent past. Last month the average velocity was just under 15 miles per hour. Yesterday it was 30.

I know those numbers because in September a group from the Pittsburgh chapter of Engineers without Borders (EWB) came to Tingo to survey the mountain for a water system they hope to build. While here, they installed a meter to determine whether a turbine, mounted somewhere in the village, could power a water pump. Read more…

In June I arrive in Quito, one of 66 volunteers in the Peace Corps’ newest class posted to serve in Ecuador. Nine weeks later we complete our training – an introduction to local language and culture, to safety and medical practices, and the basic skills we’ll need at our work sites. We’re sworn in as official volunteers at the ambassador’s residence in the capital.

The Peace Corps has a long history in Ecuador (in 1962 it was among the first countries to receive US volunteers). Our group makes up the 104^th class to be stationed here.  The organization has members throughout the country, in rural and semi-rural worksites based on the needs of each community, as well as the interests and skills of the volunteers. Some find themselves in the fast-speaking coastal region, others in the sweltering jungles of the Amazon. Years back, one lucky volunteer found himself in the Galapagos. Read more…

At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything exemplary in the layout of Willets Point, Queens, with its jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards, and the cars, broken down and not, that litter the spaces between buildings. The city hasn’t built sidewalks there—neither has it installed sewers—so the main drag is both street and sidewalk, and the neighborhood looks more like Mumbai than Queens. When Roberta Brandes Gratz makes that observation in her new book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, she means the comparison as a kind of praise, a compliment to the neighborhood’s industriousness and gritty entrepreneurship. Willets Point, like the infamous Dharavi slum outside Mumbai, might be messy, but it’s also, in the best sense of the word, urban.

The reference to Dharavi is a rare instance where Gratz’s focus leaves New York City, if only briefly. The Battle for Gotham, as its subtitle suggests, is a book about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs and their storied clashes, but it’s also about how those conflicts defined the city in the years following Moses’s retirement and Jacobs’s departure for Toronto, in 1968. And, threaded into that public history, it’s an account of Gratz’s own life in New York: as a child in the city and a teenager outside of it, and as a mother, reporter, and preservationist. Those experiences, informed by a friendship with Jacobs that began in the late 1970s and continued until her death in 2006, ultimately make Gratz’s perspective both reportorial and deeply personal. Rarely is her tone equivocal; Moses, who some revisionist histories have sought to partially vindicate, she calls “undemocratic, arrogant, ruthless and racist.” Read more…

The vast majority of the architects and artists that submitted work to Contemplating the Void—an ongoing exhibition at the Guggenheim that re-imagines Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building in fanciful, and often humorous, ways—have also contributed those pieces to an online auction that will run through next week.

About half of the 178 items up for auction have yet to receive any bids, and only a quarter elicited more than one offer. The works range from the whimsical, to the psychedelic, to the esoteric, but if there’s a trend, it has more to do with the art-makers than the objects themselves; generally, it’s the fine artists and not the architects that have garnered more, and higher, bids (maybe because they’re easier to collect). Beyond that, it’s hard to see broad differences in approach or style. Some projects look like schematic architectural sketches, others more like plans, paintings, or posters. The works range in estimated value from $500 to $25,000, which, we’re guessing, is a little steep for most people. But with opening bids starting at $150 (and all proceeds going to future museum programming) it’s probably as close as many of us will get to owning a museum-quality print. After all, if you can’t afford a Toyo Ito house, at least you can buy his drawing.

After the jump, images of some of the lots and their auction status as of this morning. Read more…

In our running series on accessibility issues in buildings and cities, we’ve looked at some ways that New York City in particular may fall short when it comes to providing easy, well-maintained design for people with limited mobility. So when our publisher noticed what appeared to be a dearth of handicap-friendly design at a well-known restaurant—one that happens to sit in a landmarked building—we took it upon ourselves to investigate.

What we found was one small-scale instance of just how complex these issues can be. In this case, the restaurant blamed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) for rejecting its request to install an exterior-stairwell hand rail. The LPC countered that it had never received such a request, and that it would almost certainly have approved one if it had. The restaurant’s architect had only worked on the interiors, and therefore claimed ignorance of the whole situation.

It didn’t seem productive to investigate the matter beyond this impasse—but we did want to take a closer look at the larger issues at play here. What interested us most about this case was the building’s historic status. How do city government and private owners reconcile the desire to protect the character of historic buildings with the need to promote accessibility?

In theory, the solution is pretty straightforward. When asked about accessibility features in commercial spaces, a representative from the LPC said, “We’ve never turned down a request for barrier-free access. Our job is to try to figure out a way to solve a problem without detracting from the historic building or diminishing its significance.” To prove the point, LPC provided us with a list of landmarked buildings where new additions had been approved. Where accessibility features like ramps or lifts are necessary, the agency works with building owners to mitigate the visual effect of those additions, sometimes suggesting an appropriate color or material palette or camouflaging the new design with landscaping.

But exploring the bureaucratic world of design regulation made us curious to know more about which buildings fall under what regulations—and since we’d already started, we decided to follow the rabbit hole of building code just a little further. Here, for those curious about how these things work, is what we learned: Read more…