Suzan Wines and Azin Valy
Architects
New York, USA
Link: I-beamdesign.com
Link: The Ethics of Housing the Poor
Submission #1: "Timber Pallet Workshop"
I-Beam Design in collaboration with Department of Architecture
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, U.S. (2004)
According to Amnesty International, there are 25.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world and approximately 10.6 refugees. Countries with the largest IDP populations are Sudan (6 million), The Democratic Republic of Congo (2.3 million), Colombia (1.5 - 3.4 million), Uganda (1.4 million), and Iraq (over 1 million).
In 1999 a proposal by I-Beam Design, submitted to an Architecture for Humanity competition seeking ideas for transitional housing in Kosovo, utilized timber pallets leftover from international relief efforts. I-Beam partners Azin Valy and Suzan Wines imagined that inserting locally available materials--building rubble and straw--into pallet cavities would create insulation, privacy, and additional stability.
Timber pallets have great upside: they are a pre-built, modular, hollow core building system readily available in many urban settings.
In September 2004 Valy and Wines visited Ball State to co-facilitate a four-day workshop with thirty-five persons from our architecture department, including four faculty members and students from every year of the program. Six timber pallet structures were constructed; each is notable for its unique configuration, relationship to other structures, reliance on hand tools, and detailing system.
Submission #2: "Interview: 9.19.04"
When asked why their 1999 design proposal for transitional housing featured timber pallets, I-Beam partner Suzan Wines said: “Its initial appeal for us is its universality. Any person in any culture in any condition in any situation where timber pallets are available can work with the pallets. A pallet is modular and can be used in very different ways. It is architectural. It is extremely simple. It is recyclable. It is recycled. It is available. . . In architecture school, pallets are a great material to work with. They offer a lot of resistance. Each pallet has its own difficulties, it has its own geometry, and its own embedded history which is its nailing, its wood, its weight. All those things are embedded within it. And for an architecture student spending most of his or her time working in front of a computer, it is an eye-opening opportunity to confront real material that has mass, weight and structure, history, resistance, and ideas. To me, that is the most difficult thing: when you have ideal ideas and they collide with material and gravity. What happens? How do you resolve that?”
The full interview will be published in the upcoming Building More, Wanting Less.. book.
Bio:
I-Beam Design was officially founded by Suzan Wines and Azin Valy in 1998, although in 1996 the two architects won the International Open Competition for the redesign of Lt. Petrosino park in Lower Manhattan. Recent projects include theaters, dance, sound, film, and broadcasting studios; restaurants, public space, residences, and commercial interiors. Their work is published in Architecture, Oculus, and Thresholds magazines, among others; in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Village Voice newspapers, and in the Storefront for Art & Architecture Newsletter. Wines teaches first and third year design studios at The Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York. In 1999 Wines and Valy received a "Notable Entry" award in a competition sponsored by Architecture for Humanity; their design of affordable transitional housing for returning Kosovar refugees and other victims of war and natural disaster featured the reuse of timber pallets. In 2004 Wines and Valy visited Ball State University and co-coordinated a four-day timber pallet workshop in which 35 architecture students and faculty designed, constructed, and occupied six timber pallet structures inspired by I-Beam's earlier work.
*All photots by Jason Barisano, Joel Chappo, Rob Horner, Wes Janz, Ben Luebke, Heather Meadows, Chris Peli, and Suzan Wines.
"25 million worldwide are internally displaced"
“Global Statistics,” Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, HYPERLINK "http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004CE90B/(httpPages)/
22FB1D4E2B196DAA802570BB005E787C?OpenDocument&count=1000" (accessed February 1, 2006)