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Architects without Borders (Tech Trends Feature)
1 Jun, 2007 By: Kenneth WongCross-cultural collaboration realized with the Open Architecture Network.
In April, Lira Luis, AIA (American Institute of Architects), got a call from a relief organization based in British Columbia. The caller had found out about her design of a portable transient shelter pod. Luis was asked if the modular structure, originally intended for the tsunami victims of Thailand and Indonesia, could be used in the Solomon Islands, which had just been hit by a similar disaster. He told her he discovered the pod on a Web site. But Luis hadn't published the design on her Web site. So which site was he talking about? That was when Luis recalled that she'd created a project page with the description of the design and her contact information on OAN (Open Architecture Network) (figure 1).
 Figure 1. The number of projects hosted on Open Architecture Network (OAN), an open-source community launched in April, is rapidly growing. |
Jeffrey O'Brien, president of Minnesota-based Archigen-esis, had planned to use Google Groups to build a network of local and global contributors to the project. As a member of the local chapter of Architecture for Humanity, O'Brien and a team of volunteers had been partnering with the nonprofit Rural Integrated Development Program of Africa to provide a schematic design for the Ubwari Medical Center. But he found the Google Groups interface less adaptable to their needs, so he uploaded a new project page on OAN (figure 2). He hopes to use it to distribute information about the construction site (maps, flora and fauna and available construction materials), solicit feedback from the local people and collaborate with others around the world.
 Figure 2. Jeffrey O'Brien and other volunteers from Architecture for Humanity will use their Ubwari Medical Center project page on OAN to collaborate with others in East Congo. |
OAN is a fledging architectural portal, still in beta and barely a month old. Nevertheless, along with Luis' pod and O'Brien's hospital, the site currently hosts a total of 189 projects scattered all over the world. They include a women's center in East Timor, a library in Egypt, a health clinic in Israel and a youth center in South Africa. Here, commercial and residential projects are outnumbered by those targeted at the underprivileged population: the displaced, the refu-gees and the poor from the developing regions. The ideas in the collective portfolio are zany (an HIV/AIDS airship and clinic), creative (a playground roofed with FedEx packages), affordable (a portable fabric-domed gazebo for $2,000) and pragmatic (baled straw cabins) (figure 3). Perhaps most amazing of all, OAN is an open-source community that serves as a repository of reusable designs.
 Figure 3. OAN members envision (top) a FedEx Pak playground (design by Takayu Onishi, REDEX, Thailand) and (bottom) a mobile HIV/AIDS health clinic (design by Jeff Alan Gard, San Francisco). |
Improving the Lives of Five Billion
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