Welcome to the weekly video podcast for the new PBS
series design e-squared. This exclusive online program
will take you beyond the episode you just watched, and
deeper into the world of sustainable design.
Deeper Shades of Green
For a whole school of architects, there's a social mission
that has to deal with people in difficult circumstances,
people in the developing world. This is the sort of
architectural equivalent of Doctors Without Borders.
If you strip away all the ego in architecture, and all the
design theory, and all the hype, all the kind of hot
magazine articles, all we do is provide shelter, and if we
can't do that, you can't call yourself an architect.
When people think about being green, a lot of times they
think about renewable energy or material choice, but
there's a contextual element to being sustainable.
there's a contextual element to being sustainable.
Rather that showing up and putting it up, you're actually
working and training. So it becomes sustainable because
then it can be replicated, so if we have a number of
pile-up projects that are real examples, we could change
the policy of the way we house people.
That in turn will change the lives of millions of people.
The 75% of HIV/AIDS is in sub-Saharan Africa. If we found
a vaccine in seven to ten years, there is absolutely no way
to distribute it throughout the African continent.
That to me is an architectural problem.
You're talking about an area where young women are at
52% HIV/AIDS rate. Now how do you connect with young
women in a community in a way that's dignified and you
women in a community in a way that's dignified and you
don't stigmatize them? What we started looking at is that
there had never been a soccer league for young girls in this
community ever, there's only been soccer teams for boys,
and so we said if we built a soccer field, a football field
we could actually host a girls' league, and part of that field
would have an HIV/AIDS outreach center that would have
information and then also eventually become a place for
a mobile clinic.
We have tried to design with pride. I mean that's the real
motive. If you design with pride and not pity, and then
the designs that you make should be able to be adapted
anywhere in the world. Some of the housing designs
that we've been developing and some of the housing
designs that a lot of these designers have been developing
could have been used in Mississippi and Louisiana after
Hurricane Katrina. Adequate, safe, secure housing rather
than being in a single-wide trailer, at a tenth of the cost.
But there was no way to get those designs in the right
channels, and that's the other hard thing, is the politics
of this. Architects won't save the world, and designers
won't save the world. When you talk about sustainability,
you need to bring in a whole new way of thinking
of who your stakeholders are, you know scientists,
innovators, industrial designers, landscape architects,
planners, the community, politicians, there's just a
whole variety, and so a community meeting is a really
dynamic meeting because you have people from all
walks of life coming together with one goal, is how do we
create a sustainable community.
The future is not going to look like New York, it's going
to look like Mumbai, it's going to be the billions and
billions of people around the world who are becoming the
next global citizens, that are becoming the emerging
economies that are going to shape the globe.
From China, Southeast Asia, to Africa, these are economies
that are changing rapidly, and if they adopt sustainable
principles, then we have to follow.
For more information and to subscribe to our other
podcasts, visit us online at design-e2.com.
