The Nepal Loft House exemplifies architecture influenced by architects.Architects are knowledge experts condi- tioned to see through the eyes of others. Collaborating with local practitioners, they can often adapt new tech- nologies to best practice ideas from the local vernacular. So it is with the suggested rehabilitation of this 28m 2 mud plaster-on-bamboo weave house in the Himalaya southeast.
Nepal In Nepal in April 2006 a republic replaced the monarchy, ending violent civil strife with Maoists. However different provocations followed as ethnic groups pursued democracy in the streets and in the new legislature. Left behind, as always, were the fearfully disadvantaged. In the Himalaya prairie of southeast Nepal, a group of Canadian architects invested a large amount of cash and teamed with the family-strengthening programs of SOS Children’s Villages Nepal. Together, despite a climate of nervous uncertainty, we created a multiple-year revolving fund to micro-finance house loans for replacement and rehabilitated mud-on-bamboo houses, and to help others generate income such they too could one day qualify for houses. It was clearly evident that borrower families needed to access design and construction expertise. But architects, engineers and technologists are not to be found locally – they congregate in urbanised Kathmandu. The Nepal Healthy House Project is a response to this dearth of expertise. Local tradespersons are being workshop-tutored and homeowners are being workshop-educated; a pocket-size house inspector’s checklist has been published; an innovative technologies demonstration house is proposed and an illustrated handbook of design-build best practices will be out in early 2010. In this project, SOS is the social sciences and micro-finance partner, Architects Without Borders Canada is the convener of the workshops, Engineers Without Borders Nepal is the interpreter of indigenous knowledge and I am coordinating from afar. Affordable shelter need not, in so far as micro-finance can succeed, be unattainable. Sustainable designs require imaginative forethought and good craftsmanship. This is a particular challenge given that one is often dependent on locally resourced and recycled materials to be used in ways that can be technically challenging and reliant on semi-skilled trades. SOS and the Canadian architects aim to enable 35 houses a year – sustainable employment that retains and encourages a small cadre of informed builders within their own communities.
Pierre Muanda, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, observes that in war-ravaged places expectations for our profession run awfully high: ‘architects are builders of new vision and hope’. My mentor, the Honorable William Kelly from the Senate of Canada, adds that as professionals we bear ‘obligations of special competency’ to serve those amongst us who are in greatest need. I have in my mind an image from the 1976 movie Apocalypse Now . Robert Duvall’s character Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s helicopter gunships assault an idyllic Viet Nam hamlet. Reeled back-to-front, devastation transforms to Shangri-La. Now, imagine an architect from afar with proto-architects from near-at-hand, backpacking instruments, flip-flopping through mud, radiating joie de vivre and laying guiding hands upon local efforts to build anew and to make better. This is our goal, an architecture in marginal and hinterland areas where human and material resources are eager and unorthodox, influenced by architects in eager and unorthodox ways, drawing on extra-architectural resources such as micro- credit, family structure, electronic communications and above all, local knowledge. C
Stanley Britton, FRAIC, is a strategic planning advisor to, and facilitator for, non-profit organisations that seek healthy and sustainable shelter solutions for the disenfranchised overseas. In this regard he is an advocate for archi- tecture influenced by architects. He can be reached at sbritton@3web.com
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