NEW DESIGN LANGUAGE

life span of the build structure by Vasylysa Shchogoleva

WS 16/17

Elective Made of Crisis
Prof. Ivan Kucina

Student: Shchogoleva Vasylysa

NEW DESIGN LANGUAGE

What can we learn from informality?
Where and how informality meets participatory process?

In the course of Elective “Made of Crisis” we have been focused on two main terms Informality and Participation.

Both of them has a very complex and multilayered face. My personal interest lies in two correlated questions:

1.     What can we learn from Informality?

2.     Where and how informality meets participatory process?

These two questions became of my concern, since I start to notice that there different processes happening in the city which it was hard to find a proper name for. In this paper through the examination of three different projects I would try to outline that informality takes places on different scales (city, neighborhood, building) and due to the different reasons (political, economical, architectural/planning etc.), while participatory process becomes one of the inevitable parts of addressing informality. Where participation is a dialog between various groups in most cases conducted by an architect or designer.   

Understanding Informality.

Through out the common discussions, informality has been defined as a process of filling up the gap or void, where formal rules are no longer valid. Since we look at the physical space, we may acknowledge, that informality may occur on different scales depending on certain conditions of the area where it takes place.

The most obvious and that’s why widely discussed manifestation of informality is usually associated with an image of a poor neighborhood in the city with trash on the sidewalks and grey water running next to it with vendors selling food, cloths, groceries for the cheap prices next to it. These areas have been called “informal settlements”, “favelas” or “slums”. Appearance of this type of settlement usually relates to the too fast process of urbanization.

“The world today is changing pretty dramatically, shifting to more and more people living in cities.
[…] by the 20^th century 10% of world population lived in cities. And if we continue at the pace we are, which we will, in 40 years we will reach the number of 75% of the population living in cities. This putts enormous amount of pressure on any system which is limited in its resources.” [1]

The documentary “Urbanized” which was released in 2011 was one of the first movies which touched on the subject of “informal” life in the city. Informal settlement as we can see from the episodes presented in the movie, while featuring at the beginning, as an example, the slums of Mumbai (India), is a result of unequal distribution of economy. People move to the cities in aspiration to find a better payment which would increase the comfort of their life. Even though it doesn’t happen, they start to build their house from the leftovers of the rich life of the big city still carrying a hope for the better future, tomorrow. Despite the absence of the most basic amenities, people who live in the informal settlements are living on a land which doesn’t belong to them and they can be asked to live it at any moment of any day which implies a high level of daily stress.

“33%, roughly, of new urban dwellers are living in the slums. That’s the thirds of the world population. Without the most basic amenities, without sewerage, without water, without sanitation.” [1]

At the same time, this people develop their own very strong communities, since it is almost the only way to survive in such conditions. That’s why, usually, one of the challenges we may face while trying to “improve” the living conditions is the destruction of this unique social fabric. Another challenge also relates to the fact, that usually, since this people are considered to be “urban poor” in case of improvement project from the government they are asked to move to another area of the city which is a problem since it changes the distance between the work and live place. One of the interesting case studies that tried to face three of the big challenges of informal settlements is the project by the Alejandro Aravena (Chile, studio Elemental).

Designing social housing through participatory design process in Chile.

Case study of the project by Alejando Aravena (Chile, studio Elemental).

social housing by studio Elemental, Iquique (Chile). taken from the web-site

“If there is any power in design, that’s the power of synthesis. The more complex the problem, the more need for simplicity. […] It is a fact that people are moving to the cities. There is a problem which I would call the 3 S manners: Scale, Speed and Scarcity with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history.
[…] What to do? Well, the answer may come from favelas and slums themselves.” [1]

Says Alejandro Aravena in his TED talk “My architectural philosophy. Bring the community into the process” where he describes 3 projects of the studio Elemental. The first one is a project of the social housing in Iquique, Chile. Government subsidized each family with 10,000 dollars for the construction of the house. At the same time this money included the purchase of the land and the construction of the infrastructure. In this project the slum was located next to the city center and the price of the land has been very high, which posed an important question in front of the team: how to still design a good quality housing while keeping people on the land where they are now.

“Due to the difficulty of the question we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constrains. And we started a participatory design process. […]” [2]

After discussions and looking into existing architectural typologies, while evaluating prons and cons of each, the team came to an idea to construct only a half of the house. In such way they will be able to keep the expenses within the budget and provide a minimum necessary house, while allowing the opportunity for the dwellers to expand their house till the necessary size for one family.

“The key question is which half do we do? And we though we have to do with public money the half that families won’t be able to do individually.” [2]

Which raised a whole set of new questions which were also solved through the participation process. Like, one of them was a question of what is more necessary a bathtub or a water heater? Most of the developers and politicians were sure that it’s water heater, while people said that they prefer a bathtub. Bathtub allows them to have a privacy while taking a shower which is more important for them.

“Participatory design is not a hippie romantic, “let’s all dream together” about the future of the city, kind of thing. It is actually not even with the families trying to find the write answer. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse then answering well the wrong question.” [2]

This have been a project of improvement of the informal settlement through formalizing the land ownership through purchase of it on the subsidized money from the government, while involving participatory process for the design phase which allowed to meet the actual needs of the dwellers and also give them an opportunity of the self-expression through the construction of the second part of the house.

In another example presented by Aravena he tries to define the role or the task which he sees as an important one for the architect of 21^st century. This task is being a bridge between the users and other stakeholders while giving an idea and hope on what can be done.

“So as a conclusion of the participatory design the alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still a problem of the costs. […] What we did was a survey in a public investment system and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place not knowing of the existing of each other. […] Design of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of a scarce resources in cities which is not money, but coordination.” [2]

Zones Urbanies Sensibles [ZUS] as an example of participatory project in Rotterdam at the scale of the neighborhood. Luchtsingel bridge.

Luchtsingel bridge taken from ZUS web-site

Let’s take a look at the other case study which takes place in Holland. It is still dealing with the urban scale, but in this case it is not about housing, but about the improvement of the existing urban infrastructure. Luchtsingel is a new path walk in the air which connects two parts of the modernist development.

“Modern city urban planning is very similar to modern graphic design or modern industrial design, its very minimalist, very ordered, very rational, separate everything out.”  [1]

Which is not the ideal situation for the vibrant and dynamic city life of today. And for this area of Rotterdam, which used to be its ticking heart before WW2.

In this situation, the project of Luchtsingel can be seeing as an informal project which fills the gap left by the modern city planning. This project is proposed by architects Elma van Boxtel and Kristian Koreman from Zones Urbanies Sensibles [ZUS]. As they state their mission is to put back architecture in society.

“One of the ways they convey their ideas is via so-called “unsolicited recommendations”, letters to ministers and city councels in which van Boxtel and Koreman voluntarily advise on current urban issues.” [1]

This approach is also goes beyond paper and takes place in a realm of physical space, but not as a solid finished buildings, but rather as a tests and prototypes.

“Let’s start with light temporarily structures…and make them more permanent if they seem to work…or if they don’t’, pull them down and try something else. Think of it as an urban research & development taking place in urban reality.” [3]

The project of Luchtsingel is one of it. It has been proposed by architects in order to create a new pedestrian path over the very wide automobile road while connecting to isolated sides of the street in the area of Rotterdam. The realization of the project became possible as a result of crowdfunding process. On the web-site created specifically for this project one could buy a plank (25 euros), a piece (125 euros) or a whole block (1250 euros) and engrave your name or your wish on it. At the same time, this project is a piece of a larger campaign “I, You, We make Rotterdam” which has been supported by different actors of the city (makers, cultural institutions etc.) which gave it a wide audience.

“We live in complex times and architecture is at the center of this complexity touching on politics, building production, utilization. The heart of the solution lies in the combination of these factors.” [3]

Leuchtstoff – Kaffeebar, at Siegfriedstrasse, Berlin.

Case study of how people create informal space within an existing structure.

leuchtstoff-kaffeebar bench sketch by Vasylysa Shchogoleva

At the same time, what if we look closer to our daily life in a city, could we find informality right behind the corner?
I think, yes. Since each day somebody is moving in and moving out, opening and closing business, school or theater, spaces are getting changed and adapted by its actual users everyday. And not all of them who do this changes are trained as architects. I would like to tell a story of one existing place I found in Berlin.

This place drove my attention with its additions and modifications provided by the owners of the space.

One of them was an outdoor bench which was open during the day and was always bringing a lot of people during the sunny hours and closed during the night.

After a closer look I discovered that there is a certain physical parameters of the existing wall that made this change possible. It was a relationship between the height of the window and the wall underneath it. This height was of 90 cm which was sufficiently enough in order to install a sitting area and also create a connection between inside and outside space. As once they placed a tabletop over the windowsill which made it possible to be a physical bridge between indoor and outdoor space, and use a windowsill as a spontaneous bar. It has been like a test suggested by ZUS above.

This brought me to the inside space of the café, where I discovered a next layer of additions and modifications made by the owners.

One of them were two new height levels which were possible due to the existing height of the wall, which was 4,20 m. This allowed to have a new additional spaces of 2.10 and 2.50 to which people were getting with the help of the ladders.

This space was like a café with an opportunity of staying for unknown time and maybe even sleeping there.

vocabulary of informality by Vasylysa Shchogoleva

These physical changes made me think that somehow they are also a product of a coincidence or a chance to a certain extent out of which is possible to learn a new language, language of informality, which later on can become part of a design language.

Personally, I would continue to look into the idea of learning from informality and applying it in the prototype through out the course of my thesis within the Studio Building Platform. Later on I may update this text with my new findings, my own experiments and challenges.

___________

1. Gary Hustwot, Urbanized, (USA, 2011) documentary 

2. Alejandro Aravena, My architectural philosophy. Bring the community to the process, (2014), TEDtalk 

3. Dutch profiles, ZUS: Zones Urbaines Sensibles (Netherlands, 2012)