Concept as a Catalyst

“…Slum dwellers share something with people caught in a war zone, where the infrastructure of society has been interrupted or destroyed. They have to scrounge and improvise, just to have the basics pf shelter, food, heat. To survive, they have to be inventive. But the people in the war zone can look forward to the end of war, the restoration of society and its services. The slum dwellers have no such prospect. For them the war, its brutalities and atmosphere of cruelty and indifference to human life, never ends…” - Lebbeus Woods

In the mega cities of the today, design is increasingly becoming a rarity, as vast seas of shantytowns, slums and favela’s flush into the city sphere. In the absence of design, safety, humanity, sanitation, clean air and everything that a city needs to work are dramatically loosing quality. Cities are transforming into war zones. It might be that the processes that define the city have become so complicated that urban design has become incomprehensible, leaving them spinning out of control. It might also be that our cities are the consequence of the chosen socio-economic model, with all of its problems as an accepted by-product. Whatever the reason, contrary to sociologists, architects seem not to be bothered. The people with the intellectual brainpower to address these problems are more involved with the designs of shoes (Zaha Hadid), catwalks (Rem Koolhaas), or buses (Norman Foster) rather than with the enormous problems our cities are confronted with.

Architect-artist Lebbeus Woods (LW) is an exception. In three posts on his blog he gives an introduction to the problem of the slums, and he provides one idea towards a solution. He proposes a capsule - a material package - to replace the regular slum dwelling, one that is fully adaptable to its surroundings, and to the requirements of the slum dweller. My first association with this idea was a similar concept for similar circumstances, but on a smaller scale. Think about the numerous capsules that have been designed for the homeless (see here here here here and here).

Eventually these capsules didn’t hit the streets simply because they where too expensive or too sophisticated. Consider the economic basis for such a concept. A typical homeless doesn’t have money for a capsule, so it would have to be given to him by charity. Government or NGO’s would have to provide money, either on grounds of marketing or aesthetics – to give the city streets a cleaner appearance – or by humanitarian motivation. But as is the case with charity, it only sustains the status quo. Its constant need for funding makes it a fragile model, because it makes it dependent on politics and goodwill. The signal to the homeless would be that there’s no hope to gain back a place in society. And think of the danger of robbery of such a sophisticated gadget by other homeless people. In the case of the slum capsules, the danger would be to have your brand new high tech capsule getting squatted by other slum dwellers. To put squatters in a position that they can get squatted themselves is a kind of cannibalism that of course is not acceptable.

But it is too easy to disqualify LW’s concept on these grounds. What LW does is not just proposing a high tech capsule per se, but he essentially defines a framework, a concept that is open to interpretation. So let’s try to interpret LW’s concept on a more abstract level. Let’s assume that slum dwellers actually already live in capsules, self built ones, though hopelessly insufficient. The materials they used to build their dwellings were acquired from garbage dumps or indeed Do It Yourself stores. Because it is a misconception that slum dwellers don’t have money – they do – but in small quantities, penny by penny, debt by debt. And as a contrast to charity, the economic basis for the improvement of their homes and lives is formed by the squatters themselves, which makes this model economically viable.

And so, in the light of LW’s concept, DIY stores can be the agents of change. They can play a pivotal role in the enhancement of the quality of life in slums. They need to sell (or provide subsidized) components that are cheap and sustainable and that assemble just as easily as Ikea furniture. These components need to be as engineered and sophisticated as LW suggests for his capsule. The drivers for the designs of these components should not be technology or comfort, but empowerment and self-determination. The slum dwelling should be made into a vehicle that can lift the slum dwellers from the cycle of poverty.

Think for example about a green roof system that could buffer and filter rainwater. That would cool the house below when the water evaporates when the sun shines. That would filter the city air from dust and would moderate the urban climate by preventing the ‘heat island’ effect. And that provides farmland to the slum dwellers that typically have their roots in rural life. In other words, green roofs could provide water and food as well as comfort.

High-engineered, low-tech components sound like a contradiction, but it has been done before. Confronted with devices that where insufficient to prevent Cholera outbreaks because they where either too expensive or too complicated, ThinkCycle took up the task to engineer a device that would be both cheap and simple. Within a few months they succeeded and crafted a new IV system that is now ready to hit the market. ThinkCycle is a web-based collaborative design network that brings together engineers, designers, academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. ThinkCycle’s multi-disciplinary approach is exactly the crux of addressing complex design problems. The power of ThinkCycle is that it looks beyond fixed disciplines. It brings people of several disciplines together through a vision in order to find an optimal design solution.

And exactly that has traditionally always been the job description of an architect. His tools are ideas. LW understood that.

But others are slowly coming around:

“…Any architectural enterprise takes at least 5 years. Today in this economy, in this political system, globally, almost no ambition, and no coalition, and no agreement lasts for more than 3 years. So there’s a painful discrepancy between the slowness of architecture and the constant turmoil with which everything moves and changes and mutates [...] Maybe we could apply architectural thinking in its pure form without necessarily building …” - Rem Koolhaas at Charlie Rose