For someone who’s experienced a serious natural disaster, an 8-by-12-foot shed can be a lifeline to normalcy. Just ask the residents of Pearlington, Miss. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a nonprofit called Building Goodness Foundation (BGF) traveled to the Gulf Coast town to help, and noticed that its flood-stricken residents had nowhere to store the few possessions they’d been able to salvage. The Charlottesville, Va.–based organization, mostly made up of local builders and architects, designed a simple shed and began building dozens of them—about 140, in total. Some residents temporarily lived in the structures, while others used them to shelter their things. “It gave people a real shining star of hope after such a devastating event,” says Mississippi local county supervisor Rocky Pullman. BGF chose not to make the design proprietary, which allowed other organizations to come to Pearlington and build more sheds using its basic model. Today, the sheds are still used for storage, albeit of a less emergency nature. “They’re still there, but now they’re painted to match the new houses the residents built,” says Charlottesville architect Mike Stoneking, AIA, BGF’s vice president and a board member.
The Pearlington sheds perfectly exemplify the power of architecture to improve a post-disaster situation. They’re not glamorous or high-design, just solid, easy-to-construct buildings that fill a very specific need. And they demonstrate the crucial role design can play in the reordering of lives scattered by events beyond their control.
hands-on help
Many disaster recovery experts are beginning to see what architects have long known: Good design is never more important than in an emergency or post-emergency situation. “Design matters, and when you’re designing a small space it really matters,” says Dana Bres, a research engineer at HUD who worked on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s post-Katrina Alternative Housing Pilot Program. And architect Sergio Palleroni, a Portland State University professor and a senior fellow at the school’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, observes that design can unite strangers thrown together by circumstance. He and his wife and partner, architect Margarette Leite, are finishing up the design phase of a Houston community center for families who were permanently displaced from different parts of New Orleans by Katrina. “It serves the need for activities for kids after school, and for cultural events and gatherings that will keep the community cohesive,” he says. “It addresses a typical problem, which is, how do you set up strategies for survival that also create community?” (Click here for more on Palleroni and Leite.)
Perhaps even more significant than actual buildings are the knowledge-based offerings architects can supply, such as construction training and building manuals. “Typically, the first thing we do is a manual, specific to disaster mitigation,” says Kate Stohr, co-founder of the nonprofit Architecture for Humanity (AFH). “It gives people a tangible way to move ahead.” In addition to its downloadable, 32-page Haiti Rebuilding 101 manual, her organization has been providing CAD and Revit training to Haitian architects and engineers. The training takes place in AFH’s recently completed Rebuilding Center in Port-au-Prince, which is designed to act as a support hub for local construction-related activities. (Click here for more information on Architecture for Humanity.)
Other groups also are helping to bolster building skills among both tradespeople and non-professional builders in Haiti. In 2010, dozens of architects, engineers, and reconstruction experts came together via the online Haiti Rewired forum to adapt an existing confined masonry manual for the country’s post-earthquake situation. (The confined masonry building method has long enjoyed popularity in Haiti, but a widespread lack of understanding of its structural principles there led to thousands of earthquake-related deaths.) Among several key players on this project were Architects Without Borders’ Oregon chapter, the Palleroni-led student design-build program BaSiC Initiative and volunteers from the engineering firm KPFF.
In addition to rebuilding Haitian homes and schools, Building Goodness Foundation currently is raising funds to build a trade school in Thomassin, Haiti, that will offer training for construction jobs and other in-demand professional positions. And Architects Without Borders’ Seattle chapter sent groups of architects and engineers to Haiti in April and August 2010 to assess the safety of structures in the towns of Léogâne and Petit-Goâve. They evaluated about 750 buildings, mostly residences, and found about 30 percent to be ready for reoccupation.
shaping the future
While some of today’s architects already are working on disaster recovery and rebuilding projects, a greater number of experienced hands will be needed in the years ahead. Climate change, overdevelopment, and other factors both natural and manmade are contributing to an exponential increase in hurricanes and flooding. “I learned in the field, but we want the next generation to be better prepared,” says Palleroni, who also teaches graduate courses in international humanitarian action through Erasmus Mundus, an academic cooperative run by the European Union. “It’s becoming an increasingly important part of professional lives in the future.” Clearly, design schools are beginning to agree. This fall, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design will debut a new area of concentration in its Master in Design Studies program called “Anticipatory Spatial Practice.” It will focus on helping students develop the skills to create pre-emptive solutions to post-disaster situations. And the College of Architecture, Art, + Design at Mississippi State University has instituted a certificate program in public design, which incorporates courses taught through the university’s Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, Miss. Programs like these will give more architects the tools they need to be of real service to nonprofit relief organizations.
While teaching design and building skills, such classes also will no doubt educate students about the importance of social capital to the efficiency of a rebuilding program. Stohr compares AFH’s experience working in Biloxi, Miss., with trying to get projects done in New Orleans or Port-au-Prince. “Biloxi is a very stable, coherent community; we talked to the building department all the time,” she says. “Versus New Orleans or Port-au-Prince, where there are inherent tensions. That makes it very difficult to build trust.” A measure of political and social stability also makes it possible to institute pre-disaster planning, which is a must, according to Palleroni. “Imagine if Haiti had an emergency plan before the earthquake,” he says. “Pre-disaster planning is essential for a quick transition.”
One way architects can gauge and leverage a community’s social capital is to try to gain more than a superficial understanding of its culture. “If we’re committed as a profession to serving populations that are underserved, we have to be able to go to responsibly work for cultures that are different from our own,” says John Peterson, AIA, founder of the nonprofit Public Architecture. “You have to go beyond the client, to local tradespeople, NGO’s, other design professionals, whatever it takes.” Often, he points out, local religious or political leaders can act as key sources of cultural information.
Failure to comprehend the housing culture of a place before repairing or redeveloping it can negatively impact its social system; if people don’t feel comfortable with the way a house looks or is laid out, they won’t want to live in it. “Reconstruction is more than building houses,” Jennifer Duyne Barenstein, head of Switzerland’s World Habitat Research Centre, told an audience at Swissnex’s “Rebuilding After Disaster” conference in November. “It’s restoring a whole habitat, or as much of it as possible.” And AFH’s Stohr emphasizes the additional importance of understanding a population’s emotional state. “Don’t get ahead of the community,” she says. “You may want to do prefab or other quick projects, but they are grieving. Try to focus on giving support.” Particularly in Haiti, the need for pre-construction services such as rubble clearing, safety assessments, and land title establishment has been so great that in most areas the actual implementation of reconstruction plans has yet to begin.
the long view
Speedy shelter solutions are useful and necessary in first-responder situations. Tents and tarps form a crucial first step in keeping people dry and sheltered. But often temporary housing solutions end up becoming more permanent ones. Over a year after the Haiti quake, for example, more than a million Haitians are still living in tents. The sometimes-fuzzy distinctions between temporary, semi-permanent, and permanent housing are undergoing a thorough re-examination. “It’s such an interesting challenge with emergency housing,” Peterson points out. “How do you prepare for this to be used long-term? Or, how do you prepare for it to not be able to be misused past a certain point?” Potential (though mostly untested) solutions abound, and many experts hope to see more of a relationship between temporary and long-term shelter. The funding for each tends to come from a different source and on a different timeline, which complicates matters. “Can the world really afford not to have them linked?” Palleroni asks. “There has to be some coordination between the two.”
The Mississippi Alternative Housing Program contains a possible option. Some of its temporary modular cottages can be transformed into permanent homes by changing the way they meet the ground (click here for more on the cottages.) Those that aren’t made permanent can be redeployed in a future emergency. This type of flexible design could enable long-term cost savings because it reduces the need for a separate permanent housing project.
Ideas for emergency housing can be explored through design competitions, but many architects question their effectiveness. Plenty of well-intentioned contests produce interesting, good-looking models that never come close to getting built. Peterson, for one, cites their often-shallow grasp of the problems at hand. “One of the reasons I think competitions are so vulnerable for failure is that while they’re great at developing clever ideas, they’re terrible at understanding local conditions,” he notes.
Design competitions do have their fans, though. Like many of his peers, Anselmo Canfora, assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and founder of the Initiative reCOVER design-build program there, believes competitions raise much-needed awareness of disaster sites. “They help bring attention to the issue in mainstream society,” he says. A proposal by Canfora and his students has been named one of 140 finalists in the Building Back Better Communities (BBBC) competition held by the Haitian government’s Ministry of Tourism. The country’s political and economic chaos sidelined the BBBC for months, but according to the organizers a plan is now in place to build or assemble the finalists on a site north of Port-au-Prince, and to eventually construct a community for 125 families using the competition’s highest-placing designs.
Canfora brings up a good point. Regardless of whether competitions are the right way to gain attention, rebuilding organizations need sustained engagement from the public, not only just after a disaster hits but for years afterward. With so many causes competing for dollars, volunteers, and media coverage, it’s not always easy to garner support. Yet the architects and designers involved in recovery projects continue to work their way through the ruins, buoyed by the promise of a more resilient future.