doing double duty 2 The Jarahieh School for Refugees is the result of another resourceful effort to make two projects from one temporary-pavilion commission. Crossing continents and cultures, it captured the architectural by-products from an international exposition and put them to use serving refugee children in Lebanon. The project began its life in Italy: the Milan Expo of 2015 consisted of seventy temporary pavilions that amounted to an expenditure of 13-billion euros. Intent on putting this massive, short-term investment to longer term use, Save the Children Italy, working with the design practice AOUMM, made a commitment to the architectural reuse of its own expo pavilion in support of its larger philanthropic mission (figure 5) . During the design process the organisation connected with London-based CatalyticAction to plan for and implement the pavilion’s afterlife as a semipermanent school for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. CatalyticAction adapted the pavilion’s modular design, reconfiguring its six independent frame structures to support the needs of both the school and the larger community of the settlement (figure 6) . After being disassembled and shipped from Italy to Lebanon, the structure was reassembled, insulated and clad by residents of the Jarahieh settlement working alongside the design team from CatalyticAction, who tapped into local skill sets and material knowledge as the basis of an inherently participatory process. The result is a multi-purpose school and community centre that leverages underused international resources with local skills and materials to improve the quality of life in the Jarahieh settlement – benefits made possible by piggybacking one project upon another.
figure 5: AOUMM, EXPO 2015 Save the Children Pavilion . Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho. figure 6 (facing page): CatalyticAction, Jarahieh School for Syrian Refugees . Save the Children Pavilion reconfigured as school. Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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