From Product to Process

Adriana Navarro - Sertich interviews a pioneer of the informal in architecture, co-founder and co-director of Urban-Think-Tank (U'TT) Alfredo Brillembourg.

• Social ad cultural responsibility is returning to the forefront of contemporary architecture. We are now witnessing spectacular libraries in depressed neighbourhoods, cable car systems in marginalised areas and museums in informal settlements.
• 'Contemporary architects working in conflict zones'
• U-TT's projects seek to 'connect the formal and informal city'. The main objective is to give the inhabitants of the local communities better accessibility and services and to bring some of the infrastructure from the formal city into the informal city.
• Working globally and acting locally.
• Brillembourg states that the aim is 'to develop best practices of typologies that can be repeated in different areas of the world but which get adapted locally.
• The idea of establishing best practices highlights the importance of transferring knowledge and supporting transnational analyses in research and urban practices. It also raises questions about the transferability of projects.
• Brillembourg says: 'We try to start our projects from an ethical position, but there are different cultural frameworks depending on the context'.
• Generally we engage the community profoundly in discussions and meeting, and we bring this community development practice to each place, though often with different methods of implementation.
• Brillembourg stresses the importance of being on the ground and engaging with the social, political and economic aspects of the local community.
• In speaking about 'connecting the informal to the formal', we need to understand that the informal city is not disconnected from the formal city.
• If there is no pride, the community won't feel integrated with the building, and over time the project loses its potential and gets sucked back into the informal fabric.
• For these projects to be effective, they need to be part of the larger city plan, thereby becoming integral to strategies of social inclusion, mobility, security and environmental protection.
• We attempt to put together communities design ideas and urban actors on the ground who are the stakeholders in order to produce high-quality architecture.
• 'This is the paradoxical problem of today's designers - how to address contemporary crises with future-orientated solutions.
• We need to understand and evaluate the impact and use value of our strategies and interventions to avoid falling into the trap of adopting an image of social good instead of addressing the social and economic realities of everyday life

Outright, I quite enjoyed this piece of writing. After reading this interview, I found distinct connections between what Alfredo Brillembourg of the Urban Think-Tank was doing and a lecture that was given as part of the Fast Forward series at Auckland University by Cameron Sinclair, CEO (Chief Eternal Optimist) of Architects for Humanity, with my excerpts from above putting a lot of emphasis on doing what Cameron Sinclair 'urban acupuncture' and the associated design processes.

The interview mainly talks about the different design processes that come into designing for poorer or informal cities of the world, in regards to community pride, the improvement of general human life quality, the creation of future infrastructure, while also taking into account different sociological differences such as: culture, race, ethnicity, class and ages. The text condones the creation of ethically based projects, that from there aim to subsequently address the principles of using best practice typologies (classification of (usually physical) characteristics commonly found in buildings and urban places, according to their association with different categories, such as intensity of development (from natural or rural to highly urban), degrees of formality, and school of thought (for example, modernist or traditional). In essence what I think was the main idea was the exploration of the principle that lower class or racially isolated, under-developed communities can be linked in with the standards of formal city infrastructure and social discipline via architecture, but namely architecture that made those inhabitants of the informal areas proud of it, involved with the process and their functional needs of the buildings, while the building is almost a symbol or means of amalgamating a better future for them.

This reading in hindsight is extremely beneficial to the brief we have been given, namely: providing a structure for a group of people with different backgrounds, potentially different cultures and functional needs (ie. our 5 people), while also being situated in comparatively trending informal area of the CBD, with industrial complexes in what is seen as a fairly well off area of Parnell. The projected idea is to create a building structure that suits and adheres to the needs of a large variety of people while addressing the social and economic realities of everyday life.