This second phase of work has been ambitious, effectively doubling the usable space that the school had by building a new first story. It’s taken a lot of structural work, fixing a few unforeseen problems, and no small effort from everyone who donated and fundraised, but now for the first time in years the building feels fresh and finished, complete with a new lick of paint, tiling and a polished stone floor.

It’s time to celebrate now, but soon we will be looking ahead to how we can tackle the next phase of construction, which we are hoping will complete the building with a second floor for accommodation that local women and volunteers can use.

Here are some photos of the new facilities, kindly taken by Arnold David in Delhi. At the bottom is also a video which John (the founder of Anusaran) has made along with a group of volunteers which are working there at the moment. It features a great walk through presented by the kids!

Since my visit to Delhi during the summer where we re-evaluated the building design and strategy at Anusaran, construction has been going strong and the new classrooms have been flying up. It can be frustrating not being on site to see how things are going, get my hands dirty, and develop ideas more as they build, but every so often I’ve been getting new photos of the work and it’s always exciting to see the progress. I really don’t understand how an architect could ever work at a distance to their project though- all these offices with projects going on abroad in places like China and the architects only visit a couple of times, it’s mad!

One thing that’s been learnt from this project is that things just don’t work from a distance. Decisions  need made on the ground instantly, and if you aren’t there to make them, well the builders will just decide what’s best (although very often they do know what’s best, by far!). It was absolutely essential that we spent a good bit of time in India while producing the initial designs, but ideally we would have stayed even longer, and really got stuck into the actual construction and craft of the building. That’s when it all becomes real after all. As designers we are sometimes stuck in the realm of the virtual, and we miss out completely on the mud, grit, tactility and reality of what it is to build. It’s all too easy to draw a nice crisp line for a wall and forget about the skilled process of carefully hand-mixing the cement, carrying the bricks and knowing their weight and strength, judging and feeling the walls as they rise.

The architectural profession is so removed from this craft these days, and I suspect it might be this connection that will help keep buildings thoughtful and human.

Below is a selection of the photos which I’ve been sent during the construction. The building is due to be completed on 20th December, pending on a final nudge of fundraising.

If you want to give the kids and women at Anusaran the best Christmas present possible then please consider giving something so the construction can be finished in time- we need to raise a final £2000! Simply visit our giving page at https://my.give.net/anusaranind (UK donations only)

If you are a tumblr user then great, please follow us, but if you don’t have a tumblr account you can still just bookmark it or look at the summarised blog feed on the right side of our home page. We will be posting interesting things related to humanitarian architecture, art, people and general creativity fairly regularly, so it should be worth keeping an eye on!

If you would like to contribute something, or even write for us, then we would love to hear from you, just fire us an email at contact@tesseract.org.uk

It was my huge privilege to go out there this summer and discuss and develop what to do next in the school with the teachers and leaders there, and meet and negotiate with contractors and builders. I also successfully managed to fly an Indian kite for the first time (after losing a few to the clutches of tall trees).

With two years passed it was time to evaluate what we had achieved so far, and where we could cut back or develop so that we can beat rising costs and complete the school. The building has come a long way since the start of development- it’s gone from a large disheveled tin roof shed to a secure and watertight building, with new foundations, structure and concrete roof. Already these changes have made a huge difference to the functioning of the school; classes can continue right through the year even in the height of summer and the torrential rain of monsoon, and the new roof has proven a brilliant playground for the kids.

One of the key stages that had been holding us back from progressing further with the building was the purchase of a plot of land to one side of the site. Prices have risen insanely over the past years as the area has begun to get more developed, and the government has recently issued that the neighbourhood is now officially recognised and will have its infrastructure and amenities improved. We figured that enough is enough, and there is no point in spending the whole cost of construction on a single plot of land, lets just get on with it!

This has meant some redesigning and adapting, but it means that with the saved money we are ready to embark on the next stage of construction! Over the next couple of months the usable space in the school will almost double as we build 4 large new classrooms, and open up a large area on the ground floor to be used for women’s empowerment groups and meetings. New windows and natural ventilation systems will be fitted opening the classes up to natural light and air.

Money is in place to get the ball rolling, and to complete this next stage we need about £7000 extra. If you would like to support Anusaran and the women and children then head over to the new official giving page- give.net/anusaranind

Here are a couple of images we’ve put together of what will be achieved in this next phase. We can’t wait to get going!

One of the most interesting things which often distinguishes ‘humanitarian’ architecture from the rest of our built world is the huge focus on the process. Instead of just facing the usual concerns of how to get a building up as fast as possible for as little money as possible (and perhaps also keeping your carbon footprint to a minimum) projects like this get deeply concerned with how the community can be really involved and empowered as much as possible.

With this project in Rwanda that meant setting up a cooperative of about 250 women who worked together with the architects to develop a stronger and smarter brick which they could use to build the centre. The bricks traditionally used in the area suffer from unpredictable deforming and crumbling, but with a bit of research and experimenting a team of 30 women are now producing 20,000 of their new and improved bricks every week. They’ve almost made enough to complete the centre, and they are now looking at how they can roll out their business and provide bricks to projects all across Rwanda.

What really caught my eye in this project though is how similar it is to ‘Build Our Nation‘, a project for women in the Democratic Republic of Congo which we started last year with tutors and students from across Europe. The Women’s Opportunity Centre is a really great example of design tackling ideas of empowerment, security, privacy, and participation- exactly the things that students were wrestling with in the Build Our Nation workshops- and the result here looks really fantastic.

The women’s centre in Rwanda is due to open next march on international women’s day, and I really hope that all the students who have worked together as part of the Build Our Nation project will get to see it all come together with a building completed for the women in the DRC. In the mean time the Build Our Nation team is hard at work preparing for an exhibition as part of the Venice Architecture Bienalle this year, so there will be a lot to share from that soon!

You can find out a little more about Build Our Nation at buildournation.org, and read all about the Rwanda Women’s Opportunity Centre at sharondavisdesign.com

I wish I could tell you about that time when I met JR in a bar in Brooklyn.
But you know, he prefers to be anonymous, and besides, it never actually happened…
I am sure you’ve come across that question though, the one that they seem to be so fond of when interviewing famous people who don’t really have much to say; “if you could invite anyone to dinner, dead or alive, who would it be?”
Well, my answer would be JR (and Gandalf, but I’ll save that story for an other time).

I am not reporting any breaking news here, you have probably already heard of this guy, but if you haven’t then I must really insist on you checking him out immediately.
I am being very serious right now.

JR, the french photo artist who changes the world through images which are actually larger than life.
Perhaps I have “saintified” him in my mind, as the golden boy who is actually golden straight through, rather than a hollow gold plated surface of unknown material, but I believe that my view of him is true.
He is hands down, one of the most admirable people I have ever had the pleasure of coming across.
Yes, I am fully aware that he sometimes breaks the law in order to peruse his art and mission, but there is something greater behind those actions; a genuine desire to make a difference, achieved through what could perhaps even be described as a sort of self sacrifice. He is breaking some rules in order to create new ones, humane ones, ones that could potentially change lives in the most positive of ways.
However, what justifies these actions, is in my opinion that there is no personal gain in breaking the rules, in fact, its a risk and a sacrifice, driven by an optimistic view, that things CAN change.
And how on earth are they meant to change if you don’t act? This is what I find so immensely captivating!
I am not going to get tangled up in moral and justification of illegal actions, I would like to focus on the intentions and the passion that fuels his art.
Though simply labeling it as “art” somehow doesn’t make it justice, the term is by some means so diluted that it makes it insufficient in describing his work, in this case I would say that the “art” is merely a vehicle to channel an important mission.

The category for this post is called “Art with heart”, and I think JR sums that up. His art is powered by a burning desire to make a change, to help us understand and reflect, and consequently make the world a little better.
If you look at his work, his passion, morals and values, there is nothing, whatsoever that indicates anything less than a pure and selfless urge to help , and this humbles me so immensely.
Let’s get specific before I get too carried away;
I have chosen one of his projects which i will briefly explain.
It fits perfectly actually, because once again it transcends the state of art and merges architecture, creativity and humanity into a beautiful and thought-provoking conclusion.
It touches my heart and moves my soul, and just like with the Tesseract India project, it focuses on women.
As excellently described (by someone else) “women who have nothing to give, and still share”

The project is called “Women are Heroes” and aims to accentuate the dignity and strength of exposed women who are target to conflict. The project took place in 2008 in Kibera, one of the harshest slums of Kenya.
All over the area, massive black and white portrait photographs were pasted on to facades and roofs, portraying real women, those very women who hold their society together.
One of the most beautiful features of this project are the photographs of eyes which have been displayed on the trains passing through the area. The remaining parts of the faces have been laid out on the corrugated roofs below the train track and for a split second when the train passes, the powerful gaze of the eyes is combined with the remaining parts of the smiling faces, -for a split second a balance occurs where beauty and happiness are culminated, an equilibrium where everything is as it should be.

Through the use of waterproof vinyl material, JR gave his art intervention a practical purpose too, in an interview he explained “they don’t understand art just for the love of art, it has to make sense. By helping their roofs to become waterproof, we did make sense and they loved it” .

Imagine that this is all set in an environment which most of us would rather avoid than embrace, an environment that will never ever be displayed in a glossy traveling magazine but rather pictured as a characteristic scene for violence and misery ,-it is the uncomfortable part of society which is kept in the shade, and through this project JR finally brought some light over it.
The times online magazine stated “the trade in JR’s pictures, created in third world slums and bought by affluent westernes, is reinvested in the slums, this makes him a Robin Hood figure”. JR himself intriguingly said “I am not an artist with a cause, but rather an artist who causes people to think”.
-Did we all just collectively fall in love with this man?!

I will most likely never meet JR over a whisky in a brick-walled bar in Brooklyn, but if I ever do, I swear I will let you know.
Although if against all odds it were to happen, I would probably spill my drink over him in sheer excitement.

In 2010 he was awarded the TED prize, and if you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend you check out his video here. I assure you It will be 24 minutes and 10 seconds well spent.

Jo

Here is the winning design from Robert Kane, Florence, Italy.

We felt his design really captured a strong meeting of an immortal, monumental architecture with a timeless human necessity. The structures he describes in his entry are significant throughout time, from the impact they have every time it rains, every season and harvest, and over hundreds of years as they become landmarks more and more melded with the landscape. The drawing is particularly crisp and attractive, and although we may never know if it could work it’s a great example of designing to consider a span of significance far vaster than our own lives.

The idea came from the program, where it mentioned to consider how your building would decay over time. I had a strong impulse to design something huge and monumental, an architecture that would become more like a geologic formation. And then I thought about how to exaggerate the natural processes; in this case, erosion and accumulation of runoff; and make them into something that people could benefit from. I had a hard time thinking of a better way to alleviate social problems than to ensure that everyone is well fed.

Honourable Mentions

Here are the honourable mentions, which we thought were too good to be missed. Both are very different and very intriguing ideas…

Ruben Caldwell and Leigh Salem of Studio TACK, Brooklyn, NY. (www.tack-design.com)

Some of the greatest monuments to past civilizations are infrastructural.   We wanted to continue this tradition while including an additional layer of community service.  By providing a place to find clean drinking water, we hoped to allow members of the community to free up time during their days for educational pursuits.  We were also inspired by Homeric notions of immortality, that somehow if our stories survive we do as well.  To this end the wall is intended as a repository for the stories of the generations of community members who have collected water, worked and been educated there. Their stories become a cross-section through time, revealing to the hopes and aspirations of successive generations.

Simon Hicks and Holly Lang, from London.

Sealed within a limestone structure a time-lapse camera preserves a record of the growing city. Viewed from a specific perspective steel studs embedded within the limestone align to mirror the view across the city at the time of construction, forming a window into the past. Over time as the body of recorded images grows conversely the structure erodes until a time capsule is released to future generations.

Their latest project is amazing, not only because of its originality and the successful end result, but in my opinion mainly because of the fundamental idea that underpins this project. On their website you can read the words “bring the world its colour back”. Pure and simply beautiful.
I think they had me at those words, thats when I fell in love.
The images just assured me that my first intentions were right.

A diverse cocktail of artistic talent fused together with the intention of complementing its component while staying true to the core idea; creating something better.
Boamistura (meaning good mix) create optimistic optical illusions that bring colour and encouragement back to an environment that is often associated with negativity.

From the intention to the end effect, this project is pure and hopeful, resulting in street art which is intirguing, powerful and positively intoxicating.

There is no need to over analyse this.
It is just simply really really good.

See the project in full, along with many others on their website.

Jo.

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

(Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, ISBN 9780099429838)

The way a tell is made is by a city constructing its newer buildings over the ruins of old ones. In Mesopotamia, and other river valley places, most buildings were made of simple sun-dried mud fired bricks, and the fired bricks were generally only used for facing city walls or maybe palaces and temples. the life span of these mud fired bricks was probably limited to about 75 years, before general weathering would bring about collapse.

The rubble would then be levelled to provide the foundations for the new house , thereby raising the effective ground level slightly. This process was normally continuous, the city regenerating itself cell by cell, although complete rebuilding after some sort of natural disaster, war, or long unoccupied period could happen too. A similar process has raised many cities quite a considerable height above their original level; London and Rome for example are characterised by having historic buildings with ground floors well below adjoining streets.

In some areas, where cities have been empty for long periods dust can accumulate naturally. Rudolf lanciani, in ‘The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome’, describes that “in the Forum of Trajan was no cleaned and swept once a week, at the end of a year it would be covered by an inch of dust- 100 inches at the end of a century.”

These tells conjure images of the ancient tower of babel, the great mountainous tower which men used to try to reach heaven in many ancient texts. The presence of layering and history, and the slow building of something monumental and permanent over time is interesting- almost a sort of man-made anti-erosion. Instead of our impact on the landscape being scraped away by the elements over time, we gradually build a new landscape, over generations and millennia.

If you have seen Anna Herringer’s School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh before, you might have been struck by the innovative use of local materials, or the skillful introduction of Bangla culture through the hanging saris and coloured doors. What you might not notice on first impression, is that the building is the only two-story structure in the area. There is certainly a worldwide prestige in building height, and the small school in rural Bangladesh has become a beacon of hope and future in the community, symbolised and also perhaps aided by its extra height.

Imagine a city defined by tells- what areas would gradually grow higher as others remained the same height? It would be interesting if a sort of anti-hierarchy evolved, where the poorest housing was constantly rising higher and higher on piles of its own rubble while the city halls and banks remained in place at ground level. Perhaps a truly immortal architecture doesn’t necessitate hard-wearing materials at all, and instead could live through these tells; where an architectural need for something on a specific site is so inherent that it is constantly rebuilt in the same place, slowly rising on its own plinth.