Architect
Colombo
Submission: "Designing Temporary Dwellings for Construction Workers in Sri Lanka"
In many parts of the world construction workers live on-site. The first buildings they build are temporary living quarters for themselves. Later they occupy the permanent structure even as they complete its construction.
In Colombo, Sri Lanka, this makes some sense. Oftentimes men move to urban construction sites from rural villages at some distance from the large city. They need a place to live and why not on-site?
And it makes no sense whatsoever. These men live in some of the country's worst housing, often located a few meters from a new permanent building designed by an architect.
To an outsider, the ironies are obvious. Men hired for their construction skills build very bad shelter for themselves. Architects supervising construction of beautiful houses seem to care little or not at all when workers live in crummy conditions immediately under foot. Still, this sensibility-dismal shelter for construction workers on the sites of buildings designed by architects-is so strongly ingrained in the building culture of the country and city that architects don't see the paradox. This is just the way it is.
Vijitha Basnayake and Wes Janz undertook a series of conversations regarding this situation, after first discussing it in August 2005 at the construction site of one of Basnayake's designs. Their emails and sketches suggest two approaches. One sees the potential in the standard building systems and materials used by construction workers for their temporary houses: random pieces of wood framing and steel pipe, bamboo stalks, albesia wood siding, reused sheets of corrugated metal, sheets of plastic, twine, and more. The other imagines the temporary dwellings to be part of the final building. One approach grows from within the sensibility of the construction worker, the other is influenced more by the architect. These studies will influence Basnayake's next project, where he will incorporate the ideas into his design process and construction sequencing for the buildings.
Bio:
Vijitha
Basnayake is an architect in Sri Lanka. Several of his built
works and insights into his design process--which includes a reliance
on physical models and many conversations on-site with the contractor--are
profiled in the September-November 2001 issue of The Sri Lanka
Architect. His house for Maulie de Saram is featured in
Robert Powell's book, The New Asian House (2001).
“53%
of Sri Lankan industrial fatalities @ construction sites”
Raufdeen Rameezdeen, Chaminda Pathirage, and
Saman Weerasooriya, “Study
of Construction Accidents in Sri Lanka,” Built-Environment Sri
Lanka 7, no. 1 (August 2003): 27-32.