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Abstract

The architectural history of healthcare in South Africa remains greatly understudied, as do the consequences of the 1918–19 Spanish Flu, which ravaged its population. Yet that pandemic had great consequences for South African society, spatial planning and the development of healthcare, of which the latter two were still in their infancy at the time. This article explores the link between disease and design in South Africa through the presentation of the histories of selected hospitals, maternity homes, orphanages and a special care school designed by émigré Dutch architects from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is the product of desktop and archival research, site visits and interviews undertaken in both South Africa and the Netherlands. It outlines the disparity of care that was provided for different groups and is a first attempt to identify healthcare ideas transposed into the subcontinent fuelled by the tragic experiences of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Due to this health crisis, communities – structured in terms of language, faith and race – attempted to develop their own facilities for the care of their own. Where communities had no means of their own, charitable organisations tried to fill the void. Over the course of the twentieth century, public healthcare was centralised, but many of the community and charitable institutions persist. By chance or choice, émigré Dutch architects made a disproportionately large contribution to the development of healthcare facilities in South Africa, not only in the number and range of facilities they designed, but also by introducing contemporary ideas into South African healthcare design.

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AMPS Proceedings Series Vol 30: Cultures, Communities and Design

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Abstract

Real estate developments in Pacific Coastal hubs not only bear on human and non-human ecologies in the hubs’ connected hinterlands, but fuel urban-rural antagonisms and racism across the Pacific. Complicated with COVID and colonialism, disputes on (in)authentic belonging emerge. A quick corrective is an appeal to a transpacific U.N.-type plan to regulate land/waterbodies use. However, a totalising blueprint is near impossible, given the transpacific is beyond the sum of all its cities, waterbodies, islands and inlands. Nevertheless, the impossibility of totalisation can be an enabling force for spatial designers to explore ethics emerging from the new relations forming between coastal hubs and hinterlands; specifically spatial relations that increase marginalised peoples’ capacities to act against the intolerable. To articulate this ethics-making, this paper moves through two unfolding ideas: First, the notion of the “Outside” as developed by Blanchot, Foucault and Deleuze as a mode of thinking which pushes thinking itself outside the act of recognition and toward a more experimental line. Building from this, how can designing push thinking and acting on the relations between coast hubs and hinterlands toward an experimental line? Second, pushing thinking and designing outside themselves may mean going outside established spatial design’s canons, habits and media. Capacities rise from strange partners paired in unlikely geographies: What new capacities may form when Singapore’s “heartlanders”, whose labour are captured for economic growth, stand with Pacific Indigenous struggles against prolonged theft of land/water rights? Minding these connections is to design a plan which form represents less a determined future and more a diagram, which spurs spatial thinking and actions to constantly reinvent themselves to counter capture by colonialist property-valuation. Ethics is liberation/liberated through inventing new capacities to act and transform despite the intolerable. Between coastal hubs and hinterlands is an Outside, which is their relationship’s utmost interiority where ethical spacing begins.

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Book Title: Place-Based Sustainability: Research and Design of New Pathways for a Sustainable Social/Ecological Future

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Abstract

By engaging in repair, individuals effectively extend the life of their current products – this life extension is an opportunity to reduce overall consumption of materials and energy; it also means that that product does not have to go into a waste stream. If scaled effectively, repair, as part of a Circular Economy society, can contribute to significant reductions in environmental degradation, waste generation and associated costs, and increased value-retention. The UN Environment Programme estimates that for every item that is repaired (instead of thrown away and replaced), unit-level environmental impact reductions present a 99% reduction in new material requirement, a 95%-99% reduction in energy used, and a 95%-99% reduction in emissions. From a socio-economic perspective, this research also indicates that, relative to the cost of replacement, it is often 50%-90% less expensive for individuals to have a product repaired, versus buying a new version. Through the use of an online survey of urban and suburban communities, focused on, but not limited to the New York City boroughs, data regarding common attitudes towards, understanding of, and engagement in repair activities and product materials was collected. Geospatial analysis and mapping enabled additional insights regarding differences in place-based attitudes and engagement, as well as barriers to repair, including the ability to physically access repair opportunities, essential product or material knowledge, and the tools needed to complete a repair job. This research provides new insights about community-level barriers and enablers to increased urban repair. In addition to offering new data and insights to help independent businesses and organizations become more strategic in their service offerings and marketing efforts, it also provides information that can support the development of best practices, engagement strategies, education initiatives, and other efforts to enable the scaling of repair within urban communities as part of a Circular Economy.

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Book Title: Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design

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Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to explore playful attitudes in the context of a Finnish university consortium in order to develop a multifunctional and communal play space for the use of research and teaching personnel. The paper highlights how a mental predisposition towards adult playfulness may be employed in development and design of a physical university space for a multidisciplinary research and teaching community. The empirical material consists of 80 survey responses of personnel and students, collected in an explorative pop up space – former indoor playground for children – dedicated for free time play for university personnel for a two week period. The survey inquired attitudes towards playfulness and play in adult life. The elements of playfulness as theorized by Lieberman (1977) and brought up in the survey responses, will materialize in the design of the future playful space. For example, positive attributes in relation to playfulness, such as enjoyment, relaxation, fantasy and inspiration as facets of playfulness will be formulized into material equivalents in upcoming workshops. he paper builds on the theoretical framework combining earlier research ideas of play seen as ingrained in everyday life (De Souza e Silva and Sutko, 2008), in adult life, and playful physical space (Heljakka 2013; Saker and Evans 2016). The playful attitude provides a framework for the creation of a space that enables its users to engage in play as an activity. The main contribution of the paper is to illustrate how to combine playful attitudes with the design of a socially shared play environment and how material objects within this space can cater for play as a multidimensional activity.

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Conference: ‘Education, Design & Practice’, Stevens Institute New York. Proceedings Series 17

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Abstract

The complexity of sustainability often makes its integration into architectural education a difficult challenge. Consequently, sustainability is often not taught holistically or critically, leaving students confused as to what sustainable architecture is and how they might approach this themselves. At the same time, sustainable and low energy design must not be at the expense of our architectural imagination, yet this is often the case. Few exemplary buildings exist that are both low impact and also poetic and architecturally imaginary. Sustainable buildings are often aesthetically ‘deterministic’: i.e. their architectural language results in a ‘collage’ of the technological solutions, in a drive to meet energy or sustainability targets. This paper investigates how to bring sustainability knowledge into the studio instead of bringing the architecture studio to sustainability knowledge. In doing so, the authors illustrate the integration of sustainable design in architecture studio using blended learning, such as making use of pre-recorded video lectures, group seminars and discussions, workshops and peer-peer learning as well as traditional studio drawing activities. To embed sustainability in the architectural studio, both poetics and sustainability need to be taught together, focusing especially on the aesthetic and spatial implications of sustainability issues and decision-making. This was done by in-depth investigating and mapping of exemplary sustainable architecture case studies, and by developing studio-specific learning activities that cover both architecture and sustainability aspects. The key to integrating sustainability in architectural studio is not only to give knowledge, but to ensure that specific learning activities allow for the application of this knowledge into students’ own design projects and tasks and to discuss the implications of this knowledge for the students’ own design project and the architectural language. This supports deep learning, critical thinking and reflection skills.

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Book Title: Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined

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Abstract

Our landscapes are territorialized by the power relationships which move through them, configuring and refiguring material and movement. Anthropogenic articulations of space and procedure have engendered self-perpetuating power relationships which operate as feedback loops that degrade biodiversity, exploit resources, and disempower voices of dissent. But ways of seeing space are not limited to making legible the untouchable and indifferent ways in which time presses on: simulated space can unfold forms of multiplicity which relate alterity to the everyday. Engaging with novel representational tools can uncover new avenues of composition and illuminate spatial contingencies which offer a rich stage for design. The artifacts of seeing effectively become design interfaces, operating simultaneously as registrations and codifications of space. Contemporary digital tools enable us to understand and apply design imagination to complex landscape dynamics with the object of redefining and redirecting flows and relationships, designing and thinking at multiple scales. The ability to work between scales enables fluidity between the intimate and the regional, between discipline and its effects, between organisms and their physical environments; this kind of comprehension becomes ecological. I contextualize ecological design thinking augmented by digital tools within a Foucauldian construction of power which describes a shift from typical understandings of subtractive and transferable power to productive, ubiquitous power. Under the regime of biopower, resistance operates through performance. I ground this notion of performance in two ongoing design projects: the choreography of robotic agents encoded with autonomous planting behaviors derived from a computational framework designed to transform urban lots into culturally valuable and environmentally productive spaces in Pittsburgh; and a bioremediative planting, habitat restoration, and terraforming project utilizing native seagrasses in Indonesia.

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