Built with Care - Architecture as Communication
I came across the works of Patama Roonrakwit thanks to my architect husband, so he made sure that I knew enough about her during our visits to Thailand and as predicted by him, I fell in love with the work that she and her group called CASE do.
Photo courtesy: http://31century.org
CASE: Community Architects For Shelter & Environment, is a group of architects coming together. with a shared belief. Formed in 1997 by Patama Roonrakwit, CASE looks at a design process that challenges the conventional role of architects.
CASE works with community members, from children to adults as participants in a process to improve their shelter and environment. Patama believes appropriate information can lead to diversely valuable insights, which form a key ingredient for design. To design a home, one needs in-depth information about the people living in it, their culture, needs, desires, lifestyle, habits, possessions, dynamics and everything that in/directly influence their life within their dwelling. The community engagement is a process of revealing this information from over 100 different families living in as many homes in the proposed neighbourhood.
Each project has encourages the people to take part in in every step of the design process through activities ranging from surveying to mapping a community, group meetings to action planning workshops and to the completion of the new homes.
Talks and workshops about community building, teaching design, brainstorming sessions, group discussions, ideation sessions, etc are conducted with adults and children during each project. They reveal fine details and hidden nuances of each community, and in turn making the community intellectual stakeholders in the exercise and help develop unique, sensitive and appropriate design solutions that the community is proud of.
The projects are case examples for other interventionists in building improvement in urban poor settlements, which can well be mapped to all kinds of settlements across the world.
Photo courtesy: http://31century.org
The projects are now used as active case studies in the form of workshops as part of educational institutions in other countries, such as the UK, where Patama and Supitcha of Case conducted a workshop at the ASF.
Developing empathy, sensitivity, negotiation, compromise, and optimization all in collaboration are some of the lessons learned, during the workshops conducted by CASE. Their mode of operation is applicable to a diverse range of built spaces across different contexts, from markets, to under bridge spaces, to residential areas, that have or can have inhabitants.
Having looked at all the work done by CASE, they seem to be operating as an apt example of 'care in practice', that is anchored on well-crafted inter-relationships and intra-relationships between participants or what I have in my curatorial work referred to as 'catalysts' in the care eco-system. The reasons for this choice are as follows.
Catalysts are agents, which engage in almost bipolar manners depending on the situation. From being restless to being inert, from engaging actively to disengaging once the purpose is served, from retaining identity to dissolving without a trace, a catalyst does all these things, hence it is only apt that I refer to such participants in the care eco-system as catalysts.
The visual below is my attempt at demonstrating the various catalysts involved in this 'careful' change-making across all the projects that CASE undertakes and the inter-dependencies involved.
I have mapped aspects of care as articulated by Annemarie Mol (in Logic Of Care) and Maurice Hamington (in The Will To Care) as a way to find congruence between these texts and their demonstration through the work done by CASE.
Some key learning from Patama’s interview conducted by Kamin Lertchaiprasert (2013):
- they work with the interconnections of sectors such as economics, politics, moral, law, art and culture
- they use architecture as a medium to communicate, to create a learning process between the team and communities and the creative fraternity
- it does not always depend on the academic theories but in acknowledging the community’s relationship and their way of life
- change occurs when everyone sees their own value and potential and they work towards it proactively
- the community as co-partner creates a sense of ownership and bonding
- changing the conscience of the participating community and others, leading by example
Having looked at this example (and several others that I have studied over the past weeks) that are very much seated within social settings, make them relevant to what Annmarie calls 'interventions in lived reality'.
However, the challenge that then presents itself to the key catalysts is seated in something else.
In the logic of choice within the logic of care:
Photo courtesy: http://31century.org
CASE: Community Architects For Shelter & Environment, is a group of architects coming together. with a shared belief. Formed in 1997 by Patama Roonrakwit, CASE looks at a design process that challenges the conventional role of architects.
CASE works with community members, from children to adults as participants in a process to improve their shelter and environment. Patama believes appropriate information can lead to diversely valuable insights, which form a key ingredient for design. To design a home, one needs in-depth information about the people living in it, their culture, needs, desires, lifestyle, habits, possessions, dynamics and everything that in/directly influence their life within their dwelling. The community engagement is a process of revealing this information from over 100 different families living in as many homes in the proposed neighbourhood.
Each project has encourages the people to take part in in every step of the design process through activities ranging from surveying to mapping a community, group meetings to action planning workshops and to the completion of the new homes.
Talks and workshops about community building, teaching design, brainstorming sessions, group discussions, ideation sessions, etc are conducted with adults and children during each project. They reveal fine details and hidden nuances of each community, and in turn making the community intellectual stakeholders in the exercise and help develop unique, sensitive and appropriate design solutions that the community is proud of.
The projects are case examples for other interventionists in building improvement in urban poor settlements, which can well be mapped to all kinds of settlements across the world.
Photo courtesy: http://31century.org
The projects are now used as active case studies in the form of workshops as part of educational institutions in other countries, such as the UK, where Patama and Supitcha of Case conducted a workshop at the ASF.
Developing empathy, sensitivity, negotiation, compromise, and optimization all in collaboration are some of the lessons learned, during the workshops conducted by CASE. Their mode of operation is applicable to a diverse range of built spaces across different contexts, from markets, to under bridge spaces, to residential areas, that have or can have inhabitants.
Having looked at all the work done by CASE, they seem to be operating as an apt example of 'care in practice', that is anchored on well-crafted inter-relationships and intra-relationships between participants or what I have in my curatorial work referred to as 'catalysts' in the care eco-system. The reasons for this choice are as follows.
Catalysts are agents, which engage in almost bipolar manners depending on the situation. From being restless to being inert, from engaging actively to disengaging once the purpose is served, from retaining identity to dissolving without a trace, a catalyst does all these things, hence it is only apt that I refer to such participants in the care eco-system as catalysts.
The visual below is my attempt at demonstrating the various catalysts involved in this 'careful' change-making across all the projects that CASE undertakes and the inter-dependencies involved.
I have mapped aspects of care as articulated by Annemarie Mol (in Logic Of Care) and Maurice Hamington (in The Will To Care) as a way to find congruence between these texts and their demonstration through the work done by CASE.
Some key learning from Patama’s interview conducted by Kamin Lertchaiprasert (2013):
- they work with the interconnections of sectors such as economics, politics, moral, law, art and culture
- they use architecture as a medium to communicate, to create a learning process between the team and communities and the creative fraternity
- it does not always depend on the academic theories but in acknowledging the community’s relationship and their way of life
- change occurs when everyone sees their own value and potential and they work towards it proactively
- the community as co-partner creates a sense of ownership and bonding
- changing the conscience of the participating community and others, leading by example
Having looked at this example (and several others that I have studied over the past weeks) that are very much seated within social settings, make them relevant to what Annmarie calls 'interventions in lived reality'.
However, the challenge that then presents itself to the key catalysts is seated in something else.
In the logic of choice within the logic of care:
'what to choose and what to leave out'
and
'how do you deal with what is either unknown or is beyond the choice made, with care, if yes, then to what extent'?
Of narratives in stories of care
Of narratives in stories of care
The other interesting observation that had surfaced on sharing some of the socially interwoven examples by me was about the narrative of the 'hero' or the 'key person' that is popularly circulated as being the success story of an individual, which I agree, may be a rampant practice.
However, my questions then are:
However, my questions then are:
'are there more than one type of narratives and what do they look like'?
'is it also possible, that while the virtues, beliefs, dreams of a hero are kept intact, the role is taken on by different catalysts depending on the milieu in which the interaction and change take place, thereby ensuring that the practice is truly an ongoing process that extends itself across contexts, thereby also allowing not just replicability but also scalability without diluting the care quotient in practice'?
Also, because the key catalyst as the hero has expectations riding on them, do they not have vulnerabilities in the relationship that they share with the cared-for?
What measures does one then take in the practice of care for the care-giver itself?
Of acknowledging vulnerabilities of all catalysts involved:
Moving from the care-giving catalyst to the cared-for catalyst, given that the roles of both are well defined in the Logic Of Practice;
'what are the key responsibilities of the latter that make care in practice a healthy interaction, particularly if one were to map it to a pedagogical framework'?
Considering that most of the responsibilities are well charted out for the teacher, the responsibilities of the other participant in the equation are seldom elaborated upon, since they are most often treated as and assumed to be the only possessors of true vulnerabilities.
Nel Noddings (Caring in Education p.3) has a suggestion to this to some extent, where she says that "..there are some things children must learn even if they are not inclined to do so". She adds to this by using what Martin Buber on doing the above without the 'gesture of interference' but a 'hidden influence' proceeding from integrity (1965.p.90).
In order for the 'hidden influence' to manifest, the facilitation can be less prescriptive, leaving enough space for adaptations. However having said that, the responsibility to learn must fall on the learner (despite incongruence in inclination at some points), as much as the responsibility of the one facilitating the learning.
Speaking of assumptions on the forms of care:
'do we also have popular notions of what care looks like and are all the accepted forms necessarily valid'?
'what happens when the care is extended in an unexpected manner' or when there is an incongruence between the form of care and the intent of care'?
On realizations, acknowledgment and time in care:
' to what extent then are the visible pieces of evidence coming from the cared-for important, especially if the ripples of care are felt much later?
This then shifts my focus from the 'form of care' to the 'recognition' of it, followed by 'quantification of care'.
Quantification in care:
'How does one measure or assess care, especially when what is felt may be either incongruent with the popular notion of care or when it is insufficient in unidentifiable ways or if the gratification is not immediate'?
Care in this era and the Hero in this era:
Given the different roles these catalysts play, in this world of constant cynicism and skepticism, how does a catalyst, striving to bring about change maintain his/her drive or will or motivation to care, which as William James stresses is "what brings about the fact of caring"?
Looking at some of the key catalysts of the examples of care in practice that I curated earlier, such as Patama, Manvendra Singh Shekhawat or members of Project H or the Warka Water, I can say, that all of them take skepticism in their stride and use it as a means to not just counter the challenges, but also to diversify their own scope and go beyond the original intent and that I think has been and is a timeless virtue of a hero.
It is therefore not very difficult to map some of the above best practices in care as in other domains onto pedagogical practices since I do see a similarity in the nature of concerns that is as much shared by the education sector as any other and that the way in which those concerns have been addressed, can well become the basis for some of what transpires in the teaching-learning eco-system, albeit with some adaptations and modifications, in keeping with the spirit of care in practice.
For me personally, curating works like these also serves as a validation for what genuine design thinking can do when one looks at design as a process that has empathy sitting at the core in every step of the way and not just in what is produced as an output or its usability.
Hence, it is not entirely impossible that good design education to some extent is built around care, for it to get imbibed by its practitioners and then reflect in the work that they do.
Could we then borrow aspects of art and design education into mainstream education as a way to foster this culture of empathy and care?
That remains to be explored.
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