Progress

I think I had my epiphany two weeks ago after our mid-term review.  Most of the graduate students realized we were skirting around our research topics and our main concerns.  For me I was looking at everywhere around the informal settlement, but was never looking at how the architect can engage directly with it. 

Bingo.

With informal settlements increasingly becoming visible in the urban domain, it is becoming more likely that this will be the ground for engagement for the Architect.  As they become more sophisticated and complicated with social, economic and cultural networks, their complete destruction becomes less of an option, for the sake of creating and maintaining their potential status as a legitimate type of development.  In order for the Architect to become engaged with the informal settlement, they must in essence become a squatter themselves, re-thinking the western idea of the architectural project in order to work with the existing fabric of the informal settlement. 

I still have to work on making that a great thesis statement, but it is getting there.  What I’ve decided to do is take a normal community center and re-design it to fit within the fabric of the informal settlement.  So far, that has meant scattering the pieces to fit within open spaces within the neighbourhood of Koliwada.  Its sort of fun so far, I’ve made a children’s room to fit the size and scale of a child, and am working on connecting it to a communal kitchen. 

While the informal settlement does not have property rights, or a building code to speak of, I have to be able to meld those conditions with the knowledge, and responsibility, that I have as an Architect. 

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes.