Ladder: The Paradox of Hope and Fear

         

   

             This post is a response to Ted Talk by Alejandro Aravena and his architectural philosophy on bringing the community into the design process. I found the beginning of his talk to be moving about the idea of synthesizing a difficult project into simplicity along with the three S's scale, speed, and scarcity. He showed images of projects where people were given half a house and let the user to design the rest of the house. This was crucial because of a study shown where people preferred living in places where they can expand their space over the typical locked in place apartment style buildings. 

         In another project he showed an apartment complex with this same idea, however, it was responding to the issue of energy similar to glass skyscrapers and other large glass box buildings. The response was to wrap the exterior of the building in circulation to seduce the solar radiation and direct sunlight into the space. This allowed for a more engaged core socially by allowing people to see across the courtyard spaces to see other users living. 

            I found this idea of giving the users a sense of a future fascinating and I wish I would have found this talk while designing "Elevated Integration" with George Sorbara. In our design we wanted the apartments for the low income families in Portland to be able to be assembled by the families based on their needs but to be flexible in that it could be expanded later. Earlier in the Ted Talk, Alejandro was talking about how people in the apartment style buildings felt trapped and could not expand and I believe that people want a "ladder." I am using ladder as a metaphor because people tend to not like being stuck in a single place. The hope of climbing a ladder can be for a better view, better life, higher social standings, etc. which gives hope.  People are also scared of falling or failing in this case where going back to where they started can be devastating for morale. Providing a space for visual morale and community can help motivate people to push forward in life.

            Here in Alejandro's apartment building example people had a sense of community and a drive to push forward. The issue I have with this model and one George and I tried to tackle was how do we provide this visual community but allow for privacy. In Alejandro's project, the users are completely exposed to other tenants at all times. In our project we allowed for modular walls allowing for windows to be placed where the user would want visual access while allowing the ability to deny visual access for privacy based on the user.