Humanitarian Design

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Starting in 2006, residents of Moravia, a community living atop a mountain of garbage in Medell'n, were relocated to new public housing in Pajarito, a hillside neighborhood on the city's fringes, accessible by the new Metrocable line. Medell'n-based Planb arquitectos and Ctrl G partnered in a public competition to create this daycare center for 300 of Pajarito's children. Deformed hexagon modules allowed for easy rotation and organizational flexibility of classrooms. The team linked the board-formed concrete volumes in a ring and connected them with an exterior corridor, rendering terraces and cloistered areas for play. The roofs fold to mimic the

'We wanted the construction to be very straightforward since, for many people, this would be their first encounter with technology,' notes Mexico City architect Iv'n Hern'ndez Quintela of his community tech hubs. To create classrooms, information centers, and cafeterias, modular units are inserted into existing community centers. Hern'ndez says the units were inspired by 'cimbras,' the makeshift scaffolding found at local construction sites. For example, two-by-fours form the structure for a classroom's polycarbonate walls (left). Now, 72 of Hern'ndez's computer centers are open around the city, offering classes to all ages for about 15 cents each. ARCHITECT: Ludens (Iv'n Hern'ndez

The residents of Shigeru Ban’s Container Temporary Housing in Onagawa used to call themselves the unluckiest people in town. For starters, the Miyagi Prefecture town of 10,000 was all but destroyed on March 11, when 3,800 of its 4,500 houses sustained significant damage or were demolished outright. Then they lost the lottery for temporary housing, leaving them no choice but to remain even longer in the town’s gymnasium-turned-evacuation-center. But after moving into Ban’s buildings, finished in November, this crowd feels it is the luckiest. Though the end product proved to be worth the wait, Ban’s housing seemed to be a

Having received the green light from the Iwate Prefectural government to erect 60 units of temporary housing for Rikuzentakata, a seaside town of 24,000 that lost 48 percent of its homes, Sumita Jutaku Sangyo, a timber construction company based in the blighted prefecture, tapped Tokyo-based architects Masayuki Harada and Daisuke Sugawara to develop a scheme for the new homes on the appointed site—a hilly inland campground designed for recreational vehicles. Located inland in Sumita-cho, a town that survived the disaster relatively unscathed, the campsite’s individual berths were equipped with utility hookups, and seemed an ideal place for interim housing. But

One year after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, Japan is making progress toward rebuilding its devastated east coast, assisted by local architects and construction professionals eager to help—but there is still a long way to go. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s eastern Sanriku coast, triggering an enormous tidal wave that left 310,000 people homeless, 23,000 dead or missing, and a cluster of unstable nuclear reactors. Today the debris is largely cleared, roads are open, railways are back in operation, and more than half of the damaged seaports are functioning again. And there is more good news.

An advisor to the Kamaishi city government, Tokyo-based architect Toyo Ito has proposed a reconstruction scheme incorporating both built and landscape elements. Bordering the coast, the plan features berms, green belts, and sloped building sites for housing, intended to mitigate future flooding or tidal waves, while a “Fisherman’s Wharf” area and seaside park is planned to reinvigorate the city’s commercial center. ARCHITECT: Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects. BUDGET: N/A. CONTEXT: Located on the Iwate Prefecture coast, Kamaishi City was heavily damaged on March 11. Though local citizens are keen to resurrect their town as before, the government envisions rebuilding on

Yasushi Takeuchi, a professor of architecture at Miyagi University in Sendai, was at school when the earthquake hit. In an instant, electricity and cell phones died. Two hours later, the land lines went. With nowhere to go, some 40 students flocked to the campus, blankets and food in hand. For two days they hunkered down in its generator-powered buildings. During that time, the plight of one budding architect’s family prompted the teacher to take action. His protégé’s father, an oyster fisherman, lost everything—dwelling, boats, workplace—when the tsunami washed away his coastal hometown of Shizugawa. “I asked him what he needed,”

L’Ecole de Choix isn’t the only new project in town. Just up the road, a 180,000-square-foot hospital designed partly pro bono by Chicago-based Nicholas Clark Architects is slated to open this summer.

This project, funded in part by Keio University’s Environmental Innovators Program, includes an integrated community meeting place and bathhouse, set for spring completion. The compact building will house separate baths and changing rooms for men and women, plus a boiler room and multipurpose space. Due to the lack of supplies and skilled labor, architect Hiroto Kobayashi, a professor at the university, and his students devised a clever construction system using interlocking plywood panels, which can be easily assembled by the team itself with simple hand tools. ARCHITECT: Hiroto Kobayashi, Keio University. BUDGET: N/A. CONTEXT: When the public bath (On-sen) was