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.

The building is presented at three key stages through time, showing it as society changes and the elements and age begin to strip back the building, eventually revealing a monolithic cleanly picked skeleton. A dead building at the end of time- yet alive on the inside,  a complex granite labyrinth with the annals of human history and knowledge carved on the huge walls.

Michael creates a building which comes to redefine the city, and allows itself to be intruded and re-inhabited by the people. It’s purpose is clear, planned and orchestrated, but it is a design which always has people at the centre- adapting to new needs and ultimately serving us if it all goes wrong.

The design of the knowledge archive as first constructed, showing its first layer of existence as the contemporary library of steel and glass. A crisp and hi-tech monument to business, affluence, and capitalism perhaps?

The Library 200 years in the future as the centre of the new favella city in the hilltops of flooded Rio de Janeiro. The Library shows its second layer, the concrete monolith. Economies have crumbled, business has folded in and by necessity or decay the building is stripped back and re-inhabited.

One thousand years into the future only the core remains, a compressive structure, which stores the archive of human discovery etched onto granite walls. The core stores the core information needed to restart civilisation in case of a global disaster.

Photograph of the space in between the concrete monolith and the core, in the process of choreographed degradation. The slabs are the first to fall exposing the inner structure.

 

Here are the honourable mentions, which we thought were too good to be missed. If you want to see all of the entries, head over to our facebook page

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Joana Torres, from Portugal ( www.joanatorres.com )

WIN_Wash It Now

Hygiene is extremely important in society. Hygiene routines are basic measures to reduce diseases and elevate the sense of well being and social acceptance.

A network of Community Cleaning Centers throughout the city allows the homeless to take regular hygiene habits, receive hygiene provisions and get informed. Access to basic hygienic facilities is one step forward in re-integration with the society.

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Tane and Taylor Um; siblings from Toronto Canada, currently in Seoul South Korea.  Tane studied architecture at Carleton University and Taylor studied philosophy at the University of Western Ontario.

After reading the competition brief, we were reminded of a sociological study by Annette Lareau where she coined the term “concerted cultivation”.  This study focused on the childrearing of lower and middle class families, and we suspected that there were relevant elements in this line of thought that may have an influence on the successful rehabilitation of the homeless as well as those who lived below the poverty line.

Concerted cultivation refers to a parenting technique Lareau observed in middle and upper class parents.  Specifically, it involved a continuous intervention in the child’s education and social life.  Although the results were not black and white, she concluded that there was an overall effect that this style of parenting had on the child’s social prowess in social situations involving formality and structure. We were concerned that the homeless therefore, would be uncomfortable with interacting with power structures as well as bureaucracy.  If the homeless were engendered to be intimidated by the process of discovering the opportunities and the full range of services available to them, then these are the disadvantages we wanted to address in our project.

There is a burgeoning movement in Toronto that advocates free public transportation, or a ‘zero-fare’ transit system, and it occurred to us that this might be the solution.  Those that live below the poverty line can not afford public transit fare, so we decided a zero-fare monorail would accomplish two critical objectives: giving the homeless the mobility they desperately need as well as raising the homeless issue above the street level, moving what was once invisible into plain view.  From this perspective, the millions spent on outreach programs are misguided.  We can simply speed these disadvantaged populations to the services they require to achieve rehabilitation.

 

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David Sharp, Anuar Azahari from A Workshop, working out Perth, Australia. ( http://site.aworkshop.com.au/ )

We live in a very superficial society, one that can fail to see past the visible signs of homelessness. This creates tremendous disadvantage to those who already have the fewest opportunities. The problem of providing essential modern amenities to the homeless must be addressed. While homeless people in Perth can’t have a shower, treat a cut or communicate in the digital age, every attempt at re-integration will be hindered.

Our initial approach was to consult representatives of homeless support groups, who explained that while they are able to provide some necessities to the homeless, they simply don’t have the people-power to effectively distribute them when and where they are needed. We saw automation as the solution to this problem. Once we identified the need for exclusivity across this infrastructure, the Street-Aid database and card were logical conclusions.  We focused on the potential for this card to empower the homeless to take positive steps in their life as part of community.

The brief spoke of re-integration as a process, asking how design can act as a catalyst. Our understanding is that the day to day struggles of sleeping rough must be overcome before processes such as government policy/funding etc. can be truly effective. Hopefully our concept will encourage others to explore new ways in which we can streamline the distribution of resources to the homeless.

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Homeless can affect anyone. Some group of people are more likely to become homeless due to their support need or particular barriers they facing getting accommodation.

So,this project explores a long term solution to housing and rehabilitating homeless  individual and families. Homeless doesn’t mean people who don’t have shelter or house. Their house are around the world. They appropriate under used spaces and empty spaces.Link to concept moveable and sustainable design that will remain useful and significant in cities.We design moveable shelter that easy to setting and keeping. Green space in shelter can useful for themselves and have a profound effect on people. If they integrate shelter to temporary community,they can live together,sharing facility,talking with each other,this is the main idea that make them re-integrate with society.

Below is the winning design from Sarah Crowley in Melbourne, Australia (http://sararchitecture.blogspot.com). We really like the wide and multi faceted approach to rehabilitation which she has manifested in her design, through creating a strip of community buildings, housing, and facilities all the way along a strip of railway in her city. It’s architecturally a very strong solution, and although the capital cost would be high it has a wider outlook and attitude towards the entire city, stitching over a scar created in the urban landscape by the train line. The rehabilitation solution she presents is sustainable and even profitable with the inclusion of markets and ‘big issue’ offices, and although the graphic takes a while to read it is convincing and clear.

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Here is what Sarah had to say about her design, and if you would like to see more of her work visit her blog at http://sararchitecture.blogspot.com, or get in touch with her via  sfcd@live.com.au.

 This project explores a long-term solution to housing and rehabilitating homeless individuals & families. Homeless people often congregate in cities because of the infrastructure & resources available. They tend to appropriate under-used & empty spaces for living. To link in with this concept, it seemed logical to design a long-term solution to homelessness using vacant plots of land in cities. There is a lot of neglected land in & around cities throughout the world, so… let’s use these sites to re-integrate the homeless!!
The site explored in this project is a 1km strip of currently neglected land abutting the city grid of Melbourne, Australia. A train line runs through the site, making it problematic for housing, so I designed a bridge that covers the train line, which effectively reduces the noise and vibration of the trains, but also helps to increase porosity and permeability of the site.

The project will create a new ‘neighbourhood’ with a mixed demographic: 30-40% residents will be ‘formerly homeless,’ the rest will not. The idea here is to further encourage integration with others and develop a sense of community.

The neighbourhood will have a series of public programs as well as being residential. These programs will activate the neighbourhood and provide activities & jobs for the homeless,  enabling them to develop a sense of responsibility & self-worth within their new community. They will also provide a source of income to maintain and potentially help fund the development. The ‘development’ would be funded both publicly and privately.

There are innumerable vacant strips of land created by train and tram lines – obstacles that can be readily ‘bridged’ to form vibrant neighbourhoods that re-integrate the homeless. So take a look around your city… how many sites would be suitable for a project like this?

Here is the blurb from People and the Planet:

Sustainable Futures Forum

11-12 February 2012 at Strathclyde University in Glasgow

To celebrate Go Green Week, we are putting on a weekend conference for students across Scotland. This will be an opportunity for university and college students to network and exchange ideas on sustainability and social justice projects and campaigns on their campuses. Covering issues from the tar-sands to transition and human rights, there will be sessions on everything from getting green jobs or green fingers, to radicalising your curriculum and engaging your community. The event will also include NUS & CASP ‘Transition on Tour’ workshops and the People & Planet regional democracy event.
Packed with talks, workshops, skills-shares and cycle-powered social, the Sustainable Futures Forum will be the student sustainability event of the year in Scotland!
Find out more or check out the attached poster: http://peopleandplanet.org/go/sff

Transition On Tour
7-11 February 2012 in various locations including Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh & at the Sustainable Futures Forum
CASP & NUS Scotland will be travelling to four cities in Scotland to bring you a fantastically full schedule of FREE training to help you launch the most successful environmental projects for your community whilst giving you valuable, transferable skills for your whole life!
Find out more or check out the attached agenda: http://www.nusconnect.org.uk/news/article/community/3255/

JJ Colony is a slum rehabilitation district in South West Delhi. A couple of generations ago authorities cleared out a slum in the town centre, relocating the people to an area outside the city which they had carpeted in gridiron low-rise simple dwellings. In the years since, the city has sprawled, and the colony is now a blotch amongst the concrete towers of the sub-city ‘Dwarka’, a vast residential area for Delhi’s rising middle classes.

The colony soon became a hive of buildings as more and more people moved in, adding extra rooms and levels to the provided buildings as they saw fit. The result is a super-dense district with almost undefinable dwelling boundaries- things overlap, buildings share rooms, alleyways close over and emerge again, and thousands upon thousands of people live in a state of constant awareness of each other. From a basic and highly utilitarian starting point, an organic vibrant community has formed. It seems far-fetched to relate this to ancient Greek city states, but something struck a chord when I read R.E Wycherley say this in the book “How the Greeks Built Cities”…

This layout could well be part of a present day housing scheme, perhaps designed in accordance to the ideas laid out by Alexander and Chermayeff in their “Community and Privacy”, but note the variety of room arrangements within the standard house areas, indicative perhaps, of do-it-yourself building within a planned framework.

I’ve not read “Community and Privacy”, but what was startling to me about the JJ colony was the sheer difference in interpretation of those two things in comparison to my outlook. The sense of interdependence among the residents was tangible, and any news spread through the entire community in barely a few hours.

It was interesting to see how the way the people interacted was mirrored identically by the way that the architecture of the dwellings interacted, and I was left wondering which depended on which- did the people’s inherent need for each other inform the complex way in which the colony grew and developed, or did the natural and accidental organic growth of the urban environment begin to subvert the culture- effecting the interactions and worldview of the people dwelling within the system?

I want to be cautious not to idealise the JJ colony. A lot of its residents struggle in abject poverty, sickness can be rife and social horrors such as alcoholism and domestic abuse are everyday occurrences. However what I saw there besides the darkness was a vibrant and very real way of living. While staying in the colony I was sleeping on the floor of a classroom in a tiny school. At night is was too hot to sleep, the ceiling fan motionless above me due to the long rolling power cuts (which were thanks to the more affluent areas using their air conditioning day and night). Several nights I carried my mat onto the roof to sleep where it was a bit cooler. From the rooftop I could vaguely see through the darkness residents of the colony dragging their own mats and beds out into the narrow lanes, or sitting on their doorsteps fanning themselves, or men reclining on their motorbikes, or children and their parents lining the rooftops. The murmur from it all rose and fell- people continuing subdued conversations late into the night, a baby crying, a battery-powered radio playing tinny Bollywood songs, a dog barking in the distance… They were all in this together and as well as spending their live in one vast unit of housing, they were one unit of people.

JJ colony is the place where John and Abha first began Anusaran as a place for women to meet during the day to learn new skills, and for children to come and have some fun and freedom from the heavy responsibilities of home life- at least for a few hours. It remains an intrinsic focus of their work, although they now also have a growing project on the outskirts of the city, which is where we have designed the new school and shelter. I first had the opportunity to see the place in 2007 while I spent time working in the school, and a couple of years later I returned to stay in the colony itself for a few weeks while revisiting the projects.

David