Language, Language, Language
I think there needs to be a shift in language. As David said in class (and we all know to be
true): “slum” has a very, very negative connotation. I mean, you say “slum,” I think this:
What I don’t think of immediately is the image he
showed of what could be a slum in Sicily or Spain: brightly colored homes
jam-packed on a mountainside. And a slum
is basically, I guess, where residents build their own shelters and don’t have
access to basic quality-of-life amenities: running water, sewers, electricity. But that word… slum. To “go slumming” has a distinct air about it;
to “slump over” is to be so beaten down you can’t even stand upright. It’s disempowering.
“Informal architecture,” on the other hand, I think is 1. more
accurate, and 2. better suited to what we’re discussing. We spent a lot of time talking about the
Torre de David in Caracas and I know I spoke out a lot, but what use is
a building if it’s just a pile of shaped concrete and steel rods? It’s lifeless and might as well not be there
at all. In a way, “informal” architecture
may be a purer brand of architecture than “formal” architecture that architects
like to lord over: in being informal, it is wholly democratic: by the people,
for the people. There’s a natural
investment because it’s yours: you built it and made it your own. It’s what Alejandro Aravena was getting at. People have been building cities for millennia—hell,
ants and other colony insects do the same thing. Bees don’t need a box to make their hives;
when they find an empty and sheltered space—the middle of a dead tree, a large
crack in a rock, the soffits of a house—they build.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/honey-comb2-56a020495f9b58eba4af14fb.jpg)
Now that we’ve discussed it a little more, I think Habraken’s
frame is valid and makes sense. You put
in small interventions to make buildings structurally safe and let people make
it their own. You give people an open,
sheltered space, they will infill. And I
think there’s a beauty in that. People,
like everything else in the animal kingdom, are resilient. Give them an edge and they will find a way.
I like the fact that you brought this up, the definition of a slum. Before this specific class, the images that Franco showed, for me was normal architecture. I was born in an area where EVERYTHING is built by those who bought the land. Common folk with no design knowledge just a budget. If they need a room they just tack it on which ever way financially and spatially possible, top of walls have exposed metal rods to add on another floor in the future, windows are optional. To me that's actually home not a slum.
ReplyDeleteKnowing what I know now, walking into my grandparents house, I don't even know how they were able to raise 9 kids in a home where the door to the bathroom blocks the doors into the bedrooms, or how they spent so much time in the 'living room', which is actually a hall way, with corrugated polycarbonate as a roof. In the summer it feels like a sauna trapping all the heat in the tight space, and in the winters it's as if you're outside. Light bulbs are bare and dangling from the ceiling from an exposed cable that runs up the wall from the back of the tin light switch cover my grandfather fashioned out of a tomato can. M grandmother sewed matching curtains to hide the fact that none of the windows matched. Yet, you walk outside and you sense the strong community that forms in these type of places. They are resilient.
I agree that what we've been discussing is informal development, not slums. The way I see it, all slums are informal development but not all informal development are slums. Slums have other social and political meanings to it.
ReplyDelete