Expanding Architecture

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In our age of Prada-garbed, let-them-eat-Corian architects, you can’t help but admire this grass-rooted book of essays. Coeditor Bryan Bell and his Raleigh, North Carolina–based firm Design Corps have for the past 17 years been the go-to folks for engaged design. Bell’s earlier collection, Good Deeds, Good Design, with its uplifting tales of housing for migrant farmworkers in Pennsylvania or straw-bale homes in South Dakota, rallied many to the cause with its observation that architects design a paltry two percent of the built environment. That figure refers to the number of new-home buyers who work directly with an architect, but it has widely been parsed as an indictment of the profession: design serves only the filthy rich or—if they’re lucky—the ultrapoor.

Medicine has spawned the field of public health. Law can claim the public-defense system. But which branch of architecture attempts to address “the other 98 percent”? The reply, put forward in this volume, is public-interest architecture. And it’s the stuff of minor miracles. There is the tale of a Taiwanese mountain village whose residents banded together to restore a fouled creek. There’s architect turned developer Russell Katz, whose enlightened approach to building an apartment complex in Washington, DC, included placing copies of his drawings at the local library for the neighbors to peruse—an open door attitude that won him crucial public support. And there is Chris Krager, whose Austin-based firm built two modest units of subsidized housing, taking advantage of a program mainly known to tract-home builders. The project tapped a gusher of demand for smart yet affordable design: 750 people and three news crews showed up to the open house.

So far, however, that only gets us to four or five percent: there’s much work to be done. Deborah Gans, whose practice developed a design for disaster-relief housing in Kosovo, recalls arriving at an Oxford University seminar on refugee issues only to find the assembled disaster-relief wonks “completely puzzled” by the presence of an architect: We’ve got standard-issue UN tarps, they seemed to say. What’s to design? So Gans Studio set about civilizing camp life, shaping spaces for the typical camp “client”: a woman who must care for children, cook, and gather fuel while fending off a multitude of threats. The hollow structural system houses water and waste services, with flexible floor plans and clusters of semiprivate space. Thinking critically about camp life may make a world of difference elsewhere: colonial outposts like Bombay have sprouted unplanned into metropolises, Gans writes, and “the camps of today could be the cities of tomorrow.”

Others who appear in this collection are working to outfit that nascent city. The nonprofit advocacy group Public Architecture show off their fetching day-labor station: a shelter for workers typically huddled at gas stations and Home Depot parking lots. The canopied seating area provides basic services and can be adapted as a café, employment center, and classroom. Incidentally, Public Architecture reckons that if every architecture professional in the US were to donate one percent of their time to pro bono work, it would amount to the equivalent of a 2,500-person firm working full-time for the public good. Now, that’s design as activism.

The good news is that you don’t have to design yurts in Kazakhstan to make a difference. One of the most thrilling essays chronicles Invisible Zagreb, a project to transform 60 derelict properties in the Croatian capital. Damir Blaževic, whose collective Platforma 9.81 spearheaded the project, has helped colonize old slaughterhouses and textile factories with art exhibitions, screenings, raves, and concerts. In one former liquor distillery too ruined for occupancy, a light installation turned the brooding structure into a work of public art. Beyond such ephemeral events, Blaževic has forged a lasting network of businesses, arts organizations, and agencies (the national army lent them equipment, and a bankrupt company donated shipping containers as site-specific gallery space). In time, since many empty spaces are publicly owned, the designers have become de facto urban consultants, sitting on juries for competitions and weighing in on the city’s master plan. Invisible Zagreb, like many projects in this book, shows that architects can still change the world, one dance party at a time.
"Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.