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If you come (naively) expecting to see a lot of architecture at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2008 — as traditionally understood in tangible form — plan to leave disappointed.

Like the village wise man, Hashim Sarkis has a knack for making the counterintuitive intuitive, which accounts for some of his success meeting the needs of his buildings’ users—among them farmers, fishermen, and child workers—who often depend less on formal education than on their keen observation, close relationship to the environment, and common sense in their daily lives.

Brillembourg, who was born in New York but has family ties to Caracas, and Klumpner, who grew up in Austria, both studied architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York City.

Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Do-good architecture is the noble aspiration to better the shelter of mankind. Today it gets a louder hearing than usual, because the housing situation is a shambles. By 2040, a third of mankind will live in slums. Not just the poor; a third of everybody. That’s the motivating fear—the growing dread that the political and economic systems we’ve built do us active harm. There was the major trauma of Katrina, of course. Historic New Orleans collapsed, becoming a sudden sister city to the

With a series of projects in Bangladesh, Anna Heringer has turned modest resources and traditional materials into architecture that is both vigorously contemporary and attuned to local social forces. . Years before she became an architect, Anna Heringer traveled to Bangladesh as a young volunteer with Dipshikha, a nongovernment organization dedicated to rural development. “I got to know Bangladesh by spending a year studying its agricultural ways, its schools, and the health issues facing its people,” recalls the German-born architect, who has since built a series of small projects in the village of Rudrapur. Photos © Team Rudrapur Anna Heringer’s

RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. Despite the best efforts of global capital and the Internet to erase boundaries between countries, citizenship—and its attendant rights—still is defined by geography. The world’s 10 million refugees, then, occupy intermediate places where everything from basic services to a sense of dignity is defined by design. Since these schemes rarely transcend the minimal requisites of survival, we asked three architects to imagine enlightened alternatives to the tent cities and training centers that tend to dot the refugee landscape today, either in the architects’ own neighborhoods or abroad. Each of these participants has

RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. PHOOEY Architects Flemington Youth Center In October 2007, Australia’s then minister of immigration, Kevin Andrews, admitted that the government had altered its refugee policy in response to the impression that Africans, and particularly Sudanese asylum-seekers, had trouble assimilating with the culture. In the wake of the murder of Sudanese refugee Liep Gony, Andrews said, “I have been concerned that some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to put the extra money into slow[ing]

RECORD invites designers to redefine the refugee experience. Deborah Gans and DenIse Hoffman Brandt Dadaab Urban Plan “The refugee camps of today are the cities of tomorrow,” says New York–based architect Deborah Gans, who, with landscape architect Denise Hoffman Brandt, proposes reconfiguring Dadaab, Kenya, to better accommodate its three refugee settlements. Dadaab proves Gans’s point. The region around this arid town near the Somalia border, which ballooned to 200,000 people during Ethiopian military actions in Somalia in 2006, has housed the Dagahaley, Hagadera, and Ifo camps for more than 30 years. More recently, the trio of camps counted 135,000 inhabitants,

Following two decades of prison and exile, Luyanda Mpahlwa is now a founding partner in the award-winning South African firm MMA Architects. He spent two decades in prison and in exile, but Luyanda Mpahlwa is now a partner in a thriving architectural practice. MMA Architects—his Cape Town, South Africa, firm—has gained international recognition for projects both at home and abroad. The firm’s work on an innovative housing project in the impoverished Mitchell’s Plain Township has just been honored with the Curry Stone Design Prize, a $100,000 humanitarian award established this year to pay tribute to designers tackling the needs of

Flemington Youth Center In October 2007, Australia’s then minister of immigration, Kevin Andrews, admitted that the government had altered its refugee policy in response to the impression that Africans, and particularly Sudanese asylum-seekers, had trouble assimilating with the culture. In the wake of the murder of Sudanese refugee Liep Gony, Andrews said, “I have been concerned that some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to put the extra money into slow[ing] down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan.”