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
Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Finally, we arrive at some legal, conventional, low-income housing. This is the first of these vast and growing structural complexes not directly intended to hamper or harm people, and the first that directly involves architects and architectural ethics. But do-good architecture does not merely respond to material poverty. Instead, it tangos with the colossal dysfunctionalities outside any blueprints. Today’s durable disorder is the playground of city-busting militias, gangsters, armed fanatics, and the blooming demimondes of narcotics, offshore pollution, and human trafficking. A vast,
Joe Addo looks beyond architecture for his native Ghana. Joe Addo Twenty years after leaving his native Ghana to attend the Architectural Association in London and then seek employment abroad, Joe Osae-Addo found himself contemplating a return to his homeland during a visit in 2000. The West African nation had just elected a new president, and Addo sensed a “democratic fervor” that had not existed before. “There was an atmosphere of optimism and euphoria, and I wanted to be part of it,” he says. In Los Angeles he had started a practice in the early 1990s focusing on small civic
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