Architecture for Humanity - SF
Thursday, February 05, 2004
BACK TO ARCHITECTURE!
This is an article from 2002, but a good one, with Sam Davis (former Chair of Berkeley's Arch Dept.) who talks about recent policy in the Bay Area and his work researching and designing for homeless shelters.
"First, I think that part of the responsibility of teaching at a university, particularly at a public one, is that you have to deal with social issues. One could say that every kind of architecture has social implications, and that's probably true. But I've always felt that housing, among all the kinds of buildings, has the most social context and requires the greater sense of social responsibility."
Found this link on Archinect not long ago: UC Professor Gary Black proposes a lightweight durable straw bale, steel bar and concrete solution for housing reconstruction in the Mid East. And another local firm specializing in straw bale is Dan Smith & Associates who have been pushing this material for years now and have developed some notable prototypes.
And looking at shelter as a part of us a-matter offers Body Architecture : Lucy Orta now makes bodysuits that can be transformed into tent-like rooms or sleeping bags and then coupled to each other in order to create an ad-hoc community, i.e. fast small housing for mobile elements of society such as refugees, asylum seekers or the homeless.
And this friday night 02.06.04 at The Castro: My Architect is playing. This ‘Best Documentary’ nominee explores the life of Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, one of the most important architects of the twentieth century. His dramatic death—alone and bankrupt in the men’s room of New York’s Penn Station—revealed a triple life: in addition to his wife and daughter, Kahn left behind two illegitimate children, by different women with whom he had long-term relationships. MY ARCHITECT follows the five-year odyssey of Kahn’s only son, Nathaniel Kahn, as he travels the world to discover who his celebrated father really was.
