What makes a design(er) good? It is a question that plagued me while in school and has not let up since. It is the kind of question that pops up when you want it least and disappear just when you think you have it. Why are we taught about the work of Corbusier or Man Ray instead of the architect that designed my house? What makes them better designers?

Maybe great designers have a particular characteristic that makes them the best. Maybe it is being mindful. Or maybe being acutely aware of the world around them. Or maybe a good designer has a particular taste that just appeals to a wide range of people. But I don’t think this quite captures it – we are not really getting at the essence of what makes a good designer. These all describe a great designer, but they are not what makes a designer great. They are good descriptions, not driving forces.

Perhaps it’s genetics. Perhaps the great designers were simply born with something rare; they all have extra neuron connections in just the right place or a certain mole on their left leg. This could be it, but then why do we even bother to go to school? Why are we being taught architecture when there are already some people who are just gifted? Is it not just a fruitless endeavor for the moleless kids? Are there some people who will never be great, who will never have even one flash of inspiration no matter how much they try? That is pretty hard for me to believe.

This post is in part inspired and helped along by a collection of long discussions with fellow architecture student and good friend Cesar Duarte. And while this is only a working draft of this concept, I wanted to post it to get it out there for the time being.

Innovation: Innovation in Architecture exists as a spectrum. On one side, a pragmatically innovative kind of architecture, and on the other, an abstractly innovative architecture. These two extremes manifest themselves inherently within all architecture, but no where is it as obvious when looking at the pedagogies of different university curriculum. The difference between my alma mater, Northeastern, and say Columbia or the GSD as an example of the difference between:

• Pragmatic: Inside-the-box innovation.

and

• Abstract: Outside-the-box innovation.

Both are methods for discovering innovation, and each one takes an extreme stance in architecture.

Throughout the studio, Jeff and I worked on and constantly revised a manifesto that revealed our fundamental design processes as well as the heart and soul of our project:

As a studio, we have been collectively exploring the concept of flexibility and future or nextuse.  However the concept of flexibility does not prescribe anything, since flexibility can be achieved in a many different ways.  We needed to take a stance on the situation. We needed to define our attitude.  BC’s current image is one of history, tradition, and age – indeed, another Age – superimposed on a a mid-late-century infrastructure.  This is evident to the campus-goer, who can perpetuate the iconic western image of studying under a tree in the quad while being supplemented with electric power!  This timid sprouting of the new is what currently represents Boston College’s attitude.

Studio 5, or Comprehensive Design Studio, is the final studio in the Undergraduate curriculum at Northeastern. As I write this, I am now, after many long and intense years, a diploma-holding graduate of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. The work produced in this studio is the result of everything learned in the previous five years at Northeastern. Throughout this studio, we worked with a partner, and I was fortunate enough to work with my good friend, the one and only Jeffrey Montes. We were also lucky enough to be instructed by Michael LeBlanc, a Utile partner and a veteran to this studio.

The Studio 4 book is done! It has actually been done for a while, I just did not realize…

If you are feeling lazy (and I don’t blame you) and have no idea what I am talking about, I recopied what I wrote in my previous post:

This studio also will result in a book that we are publishing.  The book will be available at some point in the near future, and will contain each project of all three studios of my class.  Each studio has about 10 kids, so the book will have around 30 different projects documenting the project’s start as a prototype to its end as a city.  Because each studio made their own “city” made of 10 different projects placed like patchwork across the site, the book will also have information about the logic that went into each site.  Also, because we were making a book at the end of the semester, this studio was also a lesson in standardized representational techniques.

It is available here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/courtyard-housing/11033022

Again in Design Like You Give a Damn I found myself another excellent case study to compliment the Emergency Tents. This one I had seen before both in class and mentioned in other places, but Design Like You Give a Damn gave me a more comprehensive look.

So, in 2002, the Chile-Barrio Program created a new plan to house low-income families who were living illegally in parts of Iquique, Chile. The Chile-Barrio Program is a branch of the Regional Government of Tarapaca that works to upgrade Chile’s illegal housing problems. They hired the interdisciplinary design team Taller de Chile, which is a great firm that is made of architects, engineers, contractors, and politicians from the Universidad Catolica de Chile. The project was named the Quinta Monroy Housing Project, and the team was given a budget of $7,500 per one family house (including the cost of land). The most important goal of Taller de Chile was to build houses that could easily be added to in the future by the residents. The group also focused on the site itself and making sure that the project could be replicated in the future by the government.

In Chad, in response to the Darfur crisis, a new project designed by Ghassem Fardanesh was first tested in the field. Plain white tents, arranged in a long grid, covered the desert where a refugee camp was set up. Although it may not have looked especially revolutionary or innovative, these tents were actually the result of a long process of design and development that was a blessing to the refugees and to UNHCR. Inventively called the “Lightweight Emergency Tent,” these tents were designed to replace the old canvas tents that had been used for over 20 years. Made of synthetic plastic and designed ergonomically to meet the needs of both the refugees and UNHCR, I think these tents provide an excellent first case study to study the economic, social, and material challenges of designing for the developing world and, in particular, for disaster relief.

This project was an short investigation inspired by a project done in our Tectonics class to create a structure out of a single sheet of paper that was supported on only three points without cutting or ripping the paper. On this project, I worked with fellow architecture student and friend, Amy Vu. In class, we built an angular triangular structure (image attached) that looked like what would happen if Calatrava designed a Native American Tipi. Jumping off from this point, we were interested in purifying the form and simplifying the structure, since we had to fudge parts to compensate for the rectangular shape of a piece of paper. We were also were careful to keep a practical, real-world mindset through our development. We wanted the result to be something that could be built and assembled simply.

After thinking a lot about my last post on third world architecture, I wanted to write up some examples that can argue better than I could:

Darfur is home to over two and a half million homeless people, which is staggering when you think about it. In one refugee camp, I found a group that designed a pretty amazing and creative solution that helped thousands of refugees. The government would not allow any permanent structures to be built in the camp, so the group BOLD (Building Opportunities & Livelihoods in Darfur) found a different solution that could address multiple problems at once. They started a program that employed over 3,000 refugees in one camp (where grass was plentiful) to weave grass mats that were then sold for a small profit to a camp in North Darfur (where grass was not readily available).  These mats were then used with bamboo stakes to construct shelters for the refugees.  This program was made possible by understanding all of the material, economic, and social variables that existed and by designing a solution taking all of these variables into account.

A simple Google search would tell you that more than 100 million people in this world are homeless. With a little more digging, you could find that close to 1 billion people (close to 1 in 7) lack suitable housing. And with just a little more digging, you could start to find people who are working to change that number.  There are tons of non-profit groups, government organizations, and individuals from around the world struggle to develop new ways of housing the homeless. But what about architects? I hear the word “housing” and expect to see it followed by “architect.” But in discussions of the developing world, it rarely is.

At first glance, architects may not seem like the right choice to solve this problem. Don’t architects only build fancy buildings that have no real relevance to the third world? The third world does not need skyscrapers. Why is it not the engineers who are building houses? After all, they are the ones who have the structural and material understanding that the developing world needs. They know how to build a house, and they can build it efficiently and economically. So why architects?