This spring, students working with the International Design Clinic were invited to be one of three design teams in the city to design and construct a playhouse for the Healing House of Lafayette – a local non-profit dedicated to helping grieving children.  In order to maximize their impact, the students decided to give away the money donated for materials and fabricate the playhouse using mostly found or reclaimed elements.  This decision placed great pressure upon an already tight time frame (4 weeks), forcing the students to create a design process that emphasized fluidity, mobility and improvisation.

In the process, they began to function less like soldiers and more like guerrillas.

Rather than work in a traditional manner and propose concepts rooted in theoretical means, the students rooted their work in reality and went out into the community to discover the means that were available to them. The resulting process traded detached methods of exploration (orthographic projection, computer modeling) for more direct methods (mock-ups, material experimentation).  The fluid design process thereby created allowed the students to free themselves from an overt reliance upon preconceived plans and fold new innovations into the proposal, even as it was being built.

Submission 2: "COMMUNAL PLAY [a PLAYHOUSE + GARDENS for ABANDONED CHILDREN]" Oradea, Romania



During the building abroad program of 2006, IDC students would travel to Oradea, Romania to design and build a playground for abandoned or at-risk children. Wanting to build off the success of their spring semester work, the team worked diligently before leaving to uncover a method of working with commonly discarded materials.  However, upon arriving in Oradea, the team quickly discovered that this would simply not be possible.  The Romanian culture, having endured years of poverty while under communism, discarded little that might be of later use.  This made it virtually impossible for the team to even find scraps, even in the smallest quantities (a small stack of six used bricks were found by a dumpster one morning, only to have been scavenged by the afternoon).  Sensibly, the students quickly abandoned their initial stand and worked to find a new method of working.

The answer to their search was found in an unlikely place.  A few days after arriving in Oradea (time spent in failed attempts scavenging), the team discovered that a local business had excess topsoil that they would send to the client for the cost of transport.  Having no idea how this material would be used in the design response, the team nevertheless jumped on the opportunity and asked to have as much topsoil as possible.  The piles of dirt which resulted would eventually become the cornerstone for the design response, giving birth to not only an elaborate play landscape for the children served by the client but a new method of working.  Rather than design for scrap, the team would dedicate their efforts to uncover that which could be obtained for the cost of transport.  Then, as the trucks delivering rocks, pebbles, or broken bits of concrete rumbled to the site, the team would work out ways to use their new found treasures to create the environment requested by the client.   Full price materials would only be used sparingly, and generally were only contemplated when they allowed something that had already been delivered to have a greater presence.  Although this method was somewhat presumptuous (generally speaking, the team had no idea how they were going to use the materials prior to their arrival) and did lead to some inefficiencies in the construction process (as the design shifted to accommodate previously unknown materials), it nevertheless proved to be quite successful, allowing the team to complete not only the play area requested by the client, but a massive overhaul of the entire site.  Just as important to a client that had dedicated their lives to help those abandoned by society find a new start, the response relied upon celebrating the most overlooked materials.

Bio:

Scott Gerald Shall is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  Professor Shall’s work and teaching is based upon an ongoing study into issues ranging from sustainability and innovative materials of design to the cognitive patterns of the 21st century student.  Through this work, Scott has developed a unique guerrilla-style design process, which he teaches to his students through a series of design-abroad projects offered every spring and summer semester.

To aid this work, Professor Shall has founded the International Design Clinic (IDC) – a registered not-for-profit dedicated to giving students of design to use their skills as designers to aid a world in need.  Every summer, Professor Shall and the IDC team up with UL Lafayette’s study abroad program to send a team of students to a community in need in a foreign land.  Once in place, the students work to use the materials at hand to design and construct an intervention that will aid their host community.  In the summer of 2006, the IDC will send a team of students to Romania, where they will spend four weeks designing and constructing a playground for abandoned children.

To prepare for this experience, Scott has created a spring course, Guerrilla Architecture and Humanitarian Design that teaches students the skills they need to succeed amidst the often-harsh conditions imposed by the humanitarian-based design experience.  In this course, the students are asked to employ the techniques of guerrilla design in the field by completing a small project to benefit the local community.  In the spring of 2006, this project focused upon designing and building a playhouse to benefit a local non-profit that aids grieving children.