My friend and humanitarian design colleague Garrett recently returned to his stomping grounds in New Orleans for leisure – a trip that took him as far as Lafayette, LA. En route, he came across one of several caches of Hurricane Katrina FEMA trailers that evidently were not successfully auctioned off by the General Services Administration.…
(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…
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) 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…
Haas and Hahn are about to paint again. In 2015, they will return to the favelas of Rio de Janiero that had put their art on the map. More importantly, their vibrant neighborhood-enveloping murals had put the favela of Santa Marta on the map. With their projects the Dutch duo know perfectly well the virtuous…
People have been asking me why I landed in Kansas, of all places, to join a political campaign, of all things, this year. Well, for starters: I grew up there. When the invitation came last winter, I leapt at it – not only to take communications in a new direction (personally), but to experience my…
Greensburg, Kansas, has made fewer headlines in the past couple years. Nevertheless, it’s prudent to check in on the progress – and the manifestation of ambitions – of a community that lost nearly everything. Here, two designers observe and inquire on an impromptu afternoon drop-in… The wind blows with some constancy across the plains of Western Kansas, a landscape that stretches for hundreds of miles;…
Three years after the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku (Northeast), Japan, long-term reconstruction is still in its infancy. According to Hitoshi Abe, architecture professor at UCLA, only 14% of the devastated area’s displaced inhabitants have found permanent housing. The figure may be even lower, say at least one of his professional peers, who assembled by the…
(For BALLE – Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) It’s not every day you can ask an American, “how do you like your new currency?” In Berkshire County, Massachusetts, however, people have been asked that question for eight years. That’s how long local businesses around the rural and mountainous county have been using the BerkShare…
(For BALLE – Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) Too much fresh food heads to the compost too prematurely in the Bay Area while too many people go hungry. This is a problem that Oakland-based Food Shift is working to solve with their food recovery program, a process they incorporated into the 2014 BALLE Conference. We…
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