Responding to the Almost There: Evidence-Based Design in Design-Build Education

The success or failure of a design-build project within an underserved community often hinges upon the amount of community input during the design process. As a result, public interest designers have experimented with everything from adaptation of traditional models of the community design charrette, to web-based open-source formats that allow participation from designers and citizens around the world, all in the interest of inclusivity. While these efforts are laudable and have resulted in meaningful work, there is a significant, if subtle, means of communication between the community and architect that is too often left out of the discussion, namely, the message of community desires through the evidence of minor physical adaptation. This evidence might be defined as the “almost there” within a community; the physical manifestation of behavior aimed at responding to the need of an individual or community.The “almost there” is so often overlooked because its identifiable features are nearly always architecturally intangible, informal and impermanent, so we are rarely even conscious of them. Additionally, when these indicators are noticed, they often appear at odds with the permanent elements present in a space. Yet the action by an individual or the community (perhaps unspoken or done without thinking, such as a playing child moving a fruit-crate-turned-chair slightly into the shade) is a very important clue to some significant programmatic opportunities. These clues are essential for more interactive social spaces and provide evidence of use and desire that don’t always come out in interviews or charrettes, but may respond to the greatest programmatic needs of a community. To use an example, left-over space being used as a momentary soccer pitch by passers-by may not simply indicate a desire for play, but perhaps central social spaces of exchange. In the absence of observable behavior, two sticks left upright in the ground with a certain relationship to one another and the surrounding area may also offer similar evidence useful to a designer. Evaluating physical evidence is necessary because the presence of the design team will very likely alter the behavior of the citizens while they are present. Using these observations to respond to the way people actually live through built intervention offers a much greater likelihood of a project being a success in a community. This paper will not only discuss these opportunities, but will illustrate them in detail using a specific project where architecture students used this method of responding to the “almost there” to transform the living conditions at an orphanage in Haiti, creating the most dynamic and used spaces in the area. The author proposes that teaching this method as a primary means of research and design can ensure that crucial information is available to designers that might otherwise be difficult to obtain when working with communities with different languages, culture, and values from the design team. Furthermore, this essay discusses this method in the greater context of architectural education and argues that design-build programs are uniquely suited to bring this approach to the greater field of architecture.

Volume Editors
Sergio Palleroni, Ted Cavanagh & Ursula Hartig

ISBN
978-0-935502-94-7