Pollyanna, a friend from high school, sent me a link to a project she’s been working on with Architecture for Humanity called the Open Architecture Network. It is going to be a community driven site for sharing building plans and ideas for solving shelter-related problems. AFH is dedicated to solving architectural and design issues that come after various crises; natural or human caused.
The project is quite exciting and will hopefully help address a plethora of shelter-related problems in innovative and affordable ways. Ironically enough, the “about” page starts with a declaration of Le Corbusier’s being wrong. The banner on my site right now is nick-named after the Swiss architect. He made quite a few contributions to modern architecture, including the gigantic utilitarian apartment complex that sought to give each inhabitant a window. These structures were mostly built to house the poor, but many failed horribly. (See Paris riots, 2005) It will be interesting to see how this project manifests, and hopefully there will be a variety of solutions available so we don’t get the uniformity and banality of the banlieues.