I leave on Friday for Dhaka, Bangladesh. I'm on a mission into the unknown. There are injustices going on in the world everywhere, and I no longer feel like I can sit at home and ignore them all. I picked a place that hit my heart. The people look like me, the schools look like the ones my parents went to, the girls in the village wear the same school uniforms as my cousins, the food tastes like my aunts cooking. So that's where I'm going to start. It could have been any where in the world, really, but after searching a few different paths this is where I ended up.
My bags are packed with my western ideas, my feminist sense of equality, my 10 years of higher education, along with my personal fears and insecurities, my lack of knowledge of the local language and customs, and the fact that things change really slowly sometimes, if at all. But I am going with my eyes and ears open. I do have an agenda, sort of. I want to see if it is possible to improve the lives of rural women through the use of sustainable architecture and recent improvements in construction technology. This may turn out to too foreign a topic to even be explored.
Maybe they are not even interested. Maybe they will view me as a freak. Maybe they will laugh at me or feel sorry for my children that have to suffer without their mother for two weeks (who in reality will be living large with my husband enjoying large amounts of chocolate and television and no real bedtime). But maybe there is a villager who wants to learn something new, who doesn't like how life has always been and dreams of something different, who will welcome a different perspective. Maybe, just maybe, something good will come out of my crazy idea to make a difference.
Follow me on my journey as I travel through the unknown and maybe we will all learn something from it.
A little disappointed, even though I never expected to win, but still, not the greatest feeling to have (like I have time for an 8 day safari in India anyway). For the CODesign: A Future without Concrete competition, they didn't announce a winner as of this morning, but they did list 5 finalists.
Let's take a look:
GOgabioON: This project is based on building with recycled concrete, that uses broken down concrete pieces and builds walls out of them using wire cages (gabions).
Baghaus: Uses EarthBag wall systems (earth tamped into polypropylene bags), cob for detail and structural elements, recycled concrete or local stone for foundations, and bamboo thatch for the roof. Added is the idea of using the thorny branches of locally grown bamboo instead of barbed wire as a mortar for the earthbags.
Paperboo: Substitutes concrete with Papercrete, a mixture recycled paper and cement and reinforced with bamboo.
Ram///Bam: Uses rammed earth with bamboo reinforcement for structural building members.
ash = (c)ash: Reuses fly ash, collected as waste material from a coal burning power plant in Mettur, to make bricks. The brick kiln is powered by burning rice husks, which uses it's waste product, the rice husk ash, in the mortar for the home. The house uses a parabolic vault design to do away with reinforced concrete beams usually needed for roof support.
A lot of the projects (mine included) use bamboo for structural support. I love the idea in theory, but really have to wonder how it holds up in reality. Especially when it's embedded inside of a mud wall. If it starts to deteriorate at the foundation, there's little way of knowing, and a lot of expense in repair. I prefer when bamboo is used externally, so you can not only enjoy the beauty of the material, but also know exactly when it needs to be replaced.
I read about EarthBag technology when researching my entry. My biggest concern was the use of the polypropylene bags as casing for the soil. I applaud the use of what would normally be considered trash bags, but when the building gets torn down, can you easily separate the polypropylene from the earth? Does it leak toxins into the earth? There are natural alternatives to polypropylene bags, but I believe at this point these are made so they biodegrade after a period of time, and so not the most useful thing to use as a structural element.
A few of the projects use thatch as a roofing material, which is great in that it is cheap, local, and keeps the rain out. But what I've noticed is that there is a cultural stigma against the material, that only poor people build with it. Plus, it needs a lot of upkeep, repair, and problems with insects. Corrugated metal sheets, a material I absolutely hate, is much more desirable. I think the next competition should look at ways to reduce the use of that.
I like the idea of using broken down concrete pieces in wire cages as a building material. Over here in Germany, I see a lot of retaining walls built of wire cages filled with stone, and it's really a beautiful material. I love the recycle factor involved in this idea. Just open the cage and use the materials in a differently shaped cage for another project. It seems a little expensive though. I don't know about the availability of steel or its components, or ecological ramifications of using steel in that way, so I can't really comment.
Maybe some of you can...
I found this architectural competition on-line, through the Open Architecture Network (part of Architecture for Humanity), that was so in tune with all the thesis ideas I had that I felt like I had to enter. Only the second competition I've ever entered, and the first one completely on my own.
The idea was to come up with a way to reduce the use of concrete in the context of a low income housing development in Bangalore, India. So up my alley, or so I thought. The problem was that I had so many ideas and then in researching them, I came up with so many more. By the time I finished I must have had at least 6 more Ph.D. thesis ideas.
The ideas were so clear in my head, and so simple. Take everyday products, found in the area, and use them to not only build houses, but create jobs and improve nutrition, all without trampling the environment. And show this on less than 4 sheets of paper, with less than 250 words, and understandable across languages and cultures. Easy peasy.
I was so excited about my first draft - a bunch of pictures of products and their uses and how they are all interconnected - but when I showed it to my sister, she was like, "nice pictures, but what does it all mean?"
Back to the drawing board (which kept crashing unless I wiggled the CPU and graphic card and rebooted, but that's a story for another day).
So I kept refining until I got something somewhat understandable. The idea is to look at building in a larger context where the materials and where they come from and where they go after they are used are just as important as who is using them, are they safe to use, do they create jobs, do they produce energy, do they harm then environment. Can a house provide not only shelter but also produce energy? Can a building material also be a food source? Can a house give back more to the environment than it takes out of it?
Hopefully the judges see what I was trying to get at.
To view all the entries, go to http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/node/9610/entries/oancompetition_entries
