Visibling cities

You’d think Calvino’s Marco Polo encountered 2015 Detroit in his strange travels. He would have told of a downtown overrun with ornate, unpeopled buildings and unhindered automobiles. A slender rail line weaves through the air among skyscrapers, along which a periodic train completes twenty-minute clockwise circuits; it’s called the People Mover but has no passengers.…

Around the Bay: Humanitarian design rockets into 2015

(AFHSF) It’s been a buzzing 2015 already around the Bay Area for celebrating humanitarian design, in nonprofit and private practice alike! Here we touch on the panels, parties and fora highlighting great work by architects, planners and engineers for San Francisco and Oakland, and Haiti as well.  SPUR: New Plans For New Areas Among the…

Honest future architecture, Haiti

Last October, the second phase of a school opened in the Bel Air neighborhood of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The new spaces – four classrooms, a kitchen and multipurpose dining area, an admin building and a composting toilet bloc – were nestled beneath a dramatic single-pitch roof and impermeable vaulted ceilings. The corrugated uppermost plane deflects beating sunlight and encourages air to flow between…

Students Rebuild Haiti: Five Years Later

(Students Rebuild) You may have heard that January 12, 2015, was the five-year anniversary of a devastating earthquake in Haiti that took thousands of lives and brought down countless buildings across the island nation. But the disaster also inspired the launch of Students Rebuild, an initiative believing that young people can make big difference strengthening…