Agility and adaptation are central to any professional field.

Those about to enter a profession must learn practical and intellectual skills. But the days when specialized and narrowly defined skill-sets guaranteed a steady and reliable “living” are gone. Today’s practical skills need to be accompanied by rigorous and critical modes of thinking.

One case in point is the graduate program at Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices (MDP). In conjunction with the school’s initiative, Designmatters, which provides a blueprint for design education, the Field track of MDP provides students with a unique foundation of theory and on-the-ground training. Faculty member Sean Donahue describes the program as structured around “Investigation and intervention—how designing can be an inquiry and mode of knowledge production to inform other disciplines and issues in a unique way. Also, how can these be combined with work being done in areas of ‘good’ and social impact?”

Proposals for collective farming models for women, image via mediadesignpractices/judytoretti/Six-Weeks-in-Uganda

While “activist” design has been around for years, the Art Center model unites critical analysis with design skills. The goal is to provide useful solutions for people locally and abroad without being culturally reductive or condescending. Too often, designers try to reinvent social intervention in their haste to be in the vanguard of a “new” approach and school-based design projects. These can be equally misguided. The result can waste material resources, human capital and money, while reinforcing cultural assumptions about the “other.” This is especially true of built interventions. These can be unnecessary, unusable, and often are left to decay. Wasted resources and human effort that fail to correct culturally essentializing narratives have been well documented in ecotourism and voluntourism. These consumer-based activities exemplify the perils of modern cultural colonialism. And while there are many defenders of the “good” they do, the fact remains that they, educational institutions, and even NGO’s like Oxfam struggle with their long histories of colonialism hidden yet still entrenched in many current activities.

Organization chart displaying the roles and structure of the [anti-NGO] NGO, image via mediadesignpractices/filter/field/mlamadrid/Planification-and-Self-Evaluation-Guide-for-Social-no-empowerment

To avoid producing solutions based on invalid, often fantastical cultural projections, proposals must be rooted in a deep understanding of the culture, people, economy, and politics of the places chosen for intervention. This is, after all, an intervention. The key, according to Donahue, is “to start not with what has been created by others to ‘solve problems’ but instead start with the realities of lived life. This more holistic and community-led approach develops an understanding of the conditions as they are now—not as they were 50 or even 20 years ago. These social conditions are a set of ongoing and changing situations that are embedded in social contexts.” Read more…

Making Room, a new exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has struck a serious nerve with New Yorkers. The exhibit, which will be on view until September 15, shines a light on many of the city’s biggest housing problems, and puts on display several architectural proposals designed to alleviate them. Mayor Bloomberg has even gotten the city government involved, and is strongly pushing for many of the solutions it suggests.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tours the Making Room Exhibit on January 22, 2013. Photo Credit: Spencer T. Tucker.

The impetus for the exhibit was a set of figures uncovered by the Citizen’s Housing Planning Council (CHPC) that showed a disparity between the types of available housing in New York, which are primarily designed for traditional nuclear households, and the increasing demand for single and other non-traditional housing. Currently, only about 18 percent of the city’s population is part of a nuclear family household. Yet over half of New York is single, and the city lacks enough single bedroom and studio spaces to house them.

Coupled with this are decades-old city regulations that place restrictions on how and where people can live. For instance it is illegal for more than three unrelated adults to share a residence, or for someone to inhabit a living space smaller than 400 square feet. These restrictions mean that residents are resorting to their own improvised solutions, which are often dangerous or illegal, to be able to live in this outmoded housing stock. Topping it off, the city will need to absorb a projected increase of over 600,000 new residents in the next twenty years, most of whom will also not find the current housing stock appropriate.

Sensing this problem back in 2011, CHPC and the Architectural League invited five teams of architects to submit proposals for housing solutions that could alleviate these problems, keeping restrictive zoning ordinances a non-factor in their designs. The submissions took several different approaches, primarily focusing on flexibility of use, compact living quarters and shared spaces. One design, by Deborah Gans, proposed a series of conversions that could be performed on a single family home in Queens, which would allow the owners to rent out extra sections of the house when they no longer needed the space themselves.

A rendering of a street of converted single family homes in Astoria, Queens. The conversions would allow the original owners to rent space in their homes that otherwise be would underutilized, while still maintaining adequate space and privacy for owner and renter. Rendering by Gans Studio. Courtesy MCNY. Read more…

A year ago I didn’t expect to live in Rwanda and be working in health care, but there I was.  All this happened after I got a Global Health Corps fellowship to work with MASS Design Group. For the past few months I have been helping them oversee the construction of a doctors’ housing project in the country’s northern region, near Butaro Hospital. In addition I have been working to design a cancer infusion center, the first of its kind in the country. These two opportunities have given me firsthand knowledge of how much good architectural design can do to improve lives through capacity building as well as the use of local materials and labor.

MASS’s mission is to use architecture to improve lives. This includes creating successful outcomes in what gets built, as well as how people are impacted over the course of the entire project.

The first thing I got to work on as a Global Health Corps fellow was a housing project, which was to be a learning community where foreign and Rwandan doctors could share their knowledge both in and outside of the workplace. The project also created the opportunity to train local residents on how to construct houses.

I arrived at the construction site not knowing a word of Kinyarwanda, the local language. But we were communicating from the start; the workers’ infectious smiles brought joy to my daily experience. I soon learned the words to greet each and every one of them, each morning. Over the next few months, I was able to see a simple laborer move up the ranks to be a skilled mason, and then a team leader. I befriended the female masons on site, proud of their work and proud to be doing a job that, in Rwanda, is considered to be a man’s domain.

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Here is a simple idea: Hoist up a 20 pound bag of soil or rocks and let gravity’s pull turn that bag into a source of energy— energy enough to produce illumination.

Gravity Light is taking this idea and using it to solve a problem: the lack of electricity and its light in developing countries. In industrialized countries, we take illumination for granted. The opportunities that come with lighting up the night—reading, conversations, doing homework— could easily be encouraged with some smart design and can have profound implications for quality of life, especially in education.

GravityLight: lighting for the developing countries.

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Three years ago, faculty and students from three schools came together to form the Empowerhouse Collaborative. The participants—Parsons The New School for Design; the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School; and Stevens Institute of Technology—joined forces to compete in the US Department of Energy 2011 Solar Decathlon. We wanted to change the way affordable housing is designed and developed.

This December 4th we realized our goal, joining Habitat for Humanity of Washington, D.C. (DC Habitat) and the D.C. government to celebrate the dedication of Empowerhouse, a new home for two local families in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington. This was also a celebration of a series of firsts in the district: the first net-zero-site, the first Passive House, and one of the first low-impact residential developments.

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NYIT student volunteer working on construction site of Nosara Recycling Center, August 2012

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about sLAB Costa Rica, the design-build initiative at the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), with my studio, Holler Architecture, taking the lead. Back then my students had just finished the design of a much needed Recycling and Education Center for Nosara, a small community in northwestern Costa Rica. This past summer the project made a huge step toward reality. Funded in part through a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter over 30 NYIT architecture students traveled to Costa Rica during July and August and volunteered on the construction site of this important community project. In order not to loose momentum the students have set up a second Kickstarter campaign to help finish the project this coming January.

This past summer under the supervision of local construction professionals we were able to set up the construction site, complete the site grading, concrete foundations, and concrete block walls; and even built the first wooden roof truss. Read more…

Beginning on Veteran’s Day this past Sunday, Broooklyn-based architecture firm Matter Practice and the Times Square Alliance in collaboration with the StoryCorp Military Voices Initiative is hosting a series of live conversations between veterans and civilians right in the heart of Times Square. The pavilion where these discussions take place—located at Duffy Square, between 46th and 47th Streets and Broadway—was designed by Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger and is composed of a simple kit-of-parts plywood and glass structure, with the program titled “Peace & Quiet” because it is intended to provide not only a place of healing and shelter for housing exchanges, but a dedicated site for bridging the divide between veterans who have loyally served our country and the civilians whose freedoms they protect. Visitors and passersby are welcome to drop in, leave a note, listen to the stories, and even shake hands with and personally thank the guest veterans on-site.

“Ever wonder what it was like to sleep in a hole in the Iraq desert? What the food was like in the mountains of Afghanistan?”—these are two of the questions posed on the site’s Facebook page, where you can also view candid process shots of the structure’s design and construction process, and see live daily feedback of the program.

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Jeff Stein, photo by Jared Green

At 42 Arcosanti, a community north of Phoenix, Arizona has been celebrated, yet generally ignored, by the world at large. Nevertheless, the place that architect Paolo Soleri and his followers buit in the desert, survives. Indeed, it can teach us enormously important lessons about cities, buildings, people, nature, and authenticity of place. Jeff Stein, AIA, is president of the Cosanti Foundation. He has taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Wentworth Institute, and was dean of Boston Architectural College for seven years. He attended his first building workshop at Arcosanti in 1975. Here he gives some revealing answers about how an urban system can function as a super-organism, how historic context can shape a place and its life, as well as thoughts on the efficient use of land, growing plants and making moisture in the desert, and many other timely topics.

Jared Green: Arcosanti is a living, experimental laboratory for the “arcology” theories of Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, who recently won the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. Arcology, a literal joining of the words architecture and ecology, calls for a new alternative to today’s “hyperconsumption,” a self-reliant urban system that functions like a super-organism. How are the theories of arcology working out in practice out here in the desert at Arcosanti?

Jeff Stein: They’re working out really well but at a very small level. Arcosanti, some 42 years after it first was begun in 1970, is just a tiny fragment of what it intends to become — a town for a few thousand people. Right now, we’re at a population of a little less than 100. It’s pretty easy at that small scale to join architecture and ecology, but we have in mind some bigger ideas. While they certainly come from Paolo Soleri, they also come from Henry David Thoreau.

Before I moved to Arcosanti this past year, my wife and I lived near Walden Pond for about a decade. The contrast between that place and this is pretty interesting, but the ideas that Thoreau and Soleri both have had are pretty congruous. Thoreau said, “Give me a wildness no civilization can endure,” which isn’t quite what we’re after exactly, but you could understand his attitude back then. There is wildness that no civilization can endure. Instead what we’re after is trying to create the beginnings of a civilization that wildness can endure.

Here at Arcosanti we’re only building on a few acres of a 4,000 acre land preserve. Some 3,985 of those acres are intended to remain wild. While at the center there isn’t a group of hermits but a lively cultural center. Arcosanti is meant for a few thousand people– not just as retirees living in apartments who have to drive 20 miles for groceries — but a living, working community whose architecture is gaining some light and heat in the wintertime and shading itself in the summertime, and whose solar greenhouses are recycling organic waste and growing food for the population and producing heat energy to power the town itself.

Arcosanti, photo courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation

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How can architects expand Western science and medicine into parts of the world with different cultural and traditional values?

Western designers have been designing healthcare facilities across the world since colonial times. For centuries, the flow of medical knowledge — as with the flow of military and financial power — was one-sided. But over the past two decades, as medicine became an important Western export, the world has become flat and this knowledge transfer has turned into a two-way street.

Today, we are participating in the globalization of Western medicine – its science, commerce, and philosophical underpinnings. We see evidence of the regionalization of the delivery of Western medicine with leading healthcare brands such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical International, and The Cleveland Clinic placing their facilities and operations in emerging regions. The healthcare environments that Western architects are designing in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and India are becoming living laboratories for global cultural integration.

This trend is forcing the convergence of scientific treatment with culturally responsive delivery. I call this “bridging the empathy gap.” By this I mean that we must hear what our clients in the countries where we work are not telling us and see what they are not showing us. We need to decipher their hidden messages.

Here are three stories that reveal how even subtle cultural differences can significantly impact the design of hospitals.

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Perkins+Will, in collaboration with Atelier Ten, volunteered their time to design the first environmentally sustainable mentoring module. Called LaunchPad, it uses a repurposed shipping container for the Infinite Family initiative in Sub-Saharan Africa where millions of children grow up without the influence of adults. Amy Stokes, the program’s founder, wants to change this.

Due to the AIDS epidemic in the region, which has spread to one in ten people being infected with HIV, a disproportionate number of children and young adults are growing up without parents or without adult mentors. In response, Stokes’ Infinite Family enlists volunteer mentors from around the world to interact one-on-one via web video with at-risk youth, forming lasting relationships and helping them to become assets to their communities.

Infinite Family’s first LaunchPad mentoring lab opened in August 2012, in Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg. Their plan is to open one hundred LaunchPads over the next five years, serving more than 11,000 children. Rendering courtesy Perkins+Will.

The program has been a great success.  More than 400 mentors have given their time, engaging some 600 children over the last three years and helping them gain the confidence and self-reliance they need to become leaders in their communities.

Infinite Family’s first state-of-the-art module marks an important milestone for the program. There is funding in place to construct three more, potentially affecting the lives of thousands of under-served youth living in difficult situations. “One of the keys to successful mentoring is to have a place that is conducive to a good experience,” Stokes says. “Our LaunchPad is that place.”

I posed a few questions to Mike Kane, an architectural illustrator at Perkins+Will, who donated his time to the project and the program’s founder, Amy Stokes to learn more about the modules. The unit utilizes passive cooling, an interactive thermal wall composed of recycled water bottles, and battery-powered back-up storage banks to allow them to function off-the-grid when necessary.

The self-sustaining module utilizes operable windows and a canopy structure for passive cooling to reduce energy consumption and keep costs down. Photo courtesy Elske Photography.

Laurie Manfra: How did Perkins + Will become involved with Infinite Family?

Mike Kane: Scott Schiamberg, a former senior designer with Perkins+Will and now a visiting scholar at MIT School of Architecture, introduced the project to our New York office.

Amy Stokes: Infinite Family was introduced to Perkins+Will by a mutual colleague, with whom Scott had worked on the NYC Olympic bid. Scott was immediately enthusiastic about the project and brought to bear vast experience, ideas, and outside resources to guide it.

LaunchPad is truly the state of the art for distance mentoring. It’s a place that signals that important work is being done by the mentee and their mentors, and it’s a place where students come to invest in themselves and develop the self-reliance they need to build better lives.

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