Facing the Floods
In February 2011 we launched a short competition following a series of flooding disasters across the world over winter, from Australia to Sri Lanka, and right the way across in Brazil. In the face of such chaos and disaster it was striking how it effected first-hand people of many different cultures and classes. It’s a strong reminder that humanitarian design is not always just for the underprivileged in our world, and sometimes circumstances can throw a stable and strong society into massive humanitarian need.
We challenged participants to design for flood victims, and had a huge amount of incredibly creative and interesting entries from all over the world. Having topical competitions like this we have now found not only generates useful discussion, but can also give people who have actually been effected a voice. Enter 160 students from Queensland Institute of Technology, Australia.
We were contacted by Glenda Caldwell, a tutor in QUT, who was keen to set her students onto the competition but unfortunately our deadlines didn’t coincide, so we have ended up hosting a mini competition just for the students there. We were really excited about this; it’s been an amazing opportunity to connect students around the world to humanitarian issues, and encourage their students as future architects to take on a role of responding to these disasters.
The opportunity to show this work couldn’t be wasted and so we arranged two exhibitions which featured the work of the Australian students, and a selection from the open competition. The first exhibition took place in the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen where architecture students and academics came along and discussed the work, and second exhibition took place in a shop unit in the centre of Aberdeen, where the general public was invited to come and see what students were tackling through design.
Related posts-
Facing the Floods: Australian Winners
