On Personal Belongings After a Catastrophe

                     

Musical homage and offerings to a dead musician. Santa Ana, CA, November 2024. Photo by Myriam Mahiques 

1.     Receptiveness

Psychology and sociology continuously refer to objects from a technological perspective which is not related to individuals or the collective discourse.

In his book The System of Objects, sociologist Jean Baudrillard adds the (social) imaginary as a a dimension linked to the object: “The object as humble and receptive supporting actor, as a sort of psychological slave or confidant- the object as directly experienced in traditional daily life and illustrated throughout the history of Western art down to our own day. This object was the reflection of a total order, bound up with a well-defined conception of décor and perspective, substance and bound up with a well-defined conception of décor and perspective, substance and form. According to this conception, the form is an absolute dividing-line between inside and outside. Form is a rigid container, and within it is substance. Beyond their practical function, therefore, objects – and specifically objects of furniture- have a primordial function as vessels, a function that belongs to the register of the imaginary. This explains their psychological receptiveness.” (Baudrillard, 2020). In this sense, personal belongings are not just “things”.

 Emotivity and Phenomenology 

Materiality is essentially physical. It shapes the objects, their fabrication technique, the traces left by time. Materiality is apprehended through our senses which differ according to the culture of communities. It is a concept that expands to the idea of “social” and foremost to the relationship between people and things.

Objects achieve a special strength with the feelings they are assigned to. It could be just a simple pencil which was part of an event; for social groups, it could be a procer’s relic. Offerings are left before statues and memorials, then objects are a bridge between the alive and the dead. 

The element of human perception, the understanding, the intangible part, would be the “atmosphere”. Philosopher Gernot Böhme defines “atmosphere” as a holistic, affective, and sensual quality of a space that mediates between the objective environment and the subjective experience of individuals:

“I have introduced the concept of atmosphere (…) to designate that which mediates the objective qualities of an environment with the bodily-sensual states of a person in this environment; the environment in its entirety generates an atmosphere in which I, as a human, feel in one way or another. (…) I sense in which environment I am located (…). The concept of atmosphere is, according to this etymology, a concept concerning the in-between (Zwischen): between objective conditions and subjective states, between object and subject.” (Böhme, 2014)

China and pottery remnants in Altadena after the wildfires. March 2025. Photo by Myriam Mahiques

In an approach to the sensory expression, the previous paragraphs are pertinent to the importance of our findings in Altadena. We have seen multiple objects of daily life with different degrees of deterioration. Pieces of folk-art stand out among cutlery, toys, décor. The Army Corps of Engineers’ contractors were working with heavy machinery, cleaning lots, and preparing the preliminary excavation for soils remediation. There was no possibility of selecting what would be of value for its repair, recycle or return to the owners. The intangible and emotional aspects were not included in the post-fire management protocol.

 

1.     Possible exhibition of objects

 

Objects have their own biographies. David Howes (2023) writes about the social force of objects: “It is not that this force needs to be “revivified,” though, just acknowledged: “When you see an object reconnect with its family, when they hold an old piece of beading or interact with a pipe, it is not the object which is being reanimated but the relationship which is being rekindled on both sides because of the materiality and sensory connection that happens between them.”

There is also an extrapolation of these objects’ meaning. For example, what was décor, and now is a ruin, could become a piece of exhibit in a museum. An example of this, would be the piece of melted glass from the San Francisco earthquake and fire (1906), donated by Grace Gratton Masterson to the Turtle Bay’s Collection in Redding. The piece is exhibited online and at the museum. In this context, the glass could be exposed due to its mineralogical conditions or because now it is part of the fire collective memory.

 

2.     Brief account from San Francisco history

 

Souvenirs hunters and homeowners looking for personal possession after the earthquake and fire in San Francisco, 1906. Photo from the National Archives.

 

Charles Morris (1906) reports the desperation of people trying to save their household effects during the San Francisco earthquake and fire:

“In the awful scramble for safety the half-crazed survivors disregarded everything but the thought of themselves and their property. In every excavation and hole throughout the north beach householders buried household effects, throwing them into ditches and covering the holes. Attempts were made to mark the graves of the property so that it could be recovered after the flames were appeased.” It is interesting that he has used the word “graves” as if the objects had a life once. Implicitly, Morris has assigned to the households a higher level of importance.

 

3.     Objects from Altadena

 

A shrine that must be in good condition in the aftermath of Altadena wildfire. March 2025. Photo by Myriam Mahiques

Local art among the ruins of Altadena, March 2025. Photo by Myriam Mahiques

 

 

The Installation “Recycled Words” at the Manitoba Museum was the work of KANVA, a group of young architects in Montreal. Curator Maureen Matthews proposed words on the chairs to provoke thoughts. 2015.

The installation shown above reminds us of the single chair “exposed” among the ruins of the wildfire in Altadena. This chair might have been on a porch.  We see it as a gloomy sculpture that carries a memory of the past life in this burnt house. 

A single chair on the new lawn after the rain. Altadena, March 2025. Photo by Myriam Mahiques. 

In Los Angeles wildfires of 2025, lots of individuals grappled with what they wanted to take with them; the difficult selection lasted just a few minutes. From Gillan Telling’s article “What They Grabbed in the L.A. Fires and Why: Tender Stories from Those Who Left Almost Everything Behind (January 12th, 2025), we cite Sloan Pechia’s story who, apart from a letter from her late grandmother, she carried a poem from a book: “I also took the poem “Imagine a Woman,” which was sent to me in a letter from my mom during my freshman year of college. Reading it and reminding myself that I’m strong is why I thought to take it during these incredibly trying times.”

Valuable personal items that Sloan Pechia took with her during the wildfire evacuation.  Photos by Sloan Pechia.

This is not that everyone has the chance to survive a catastrophe. Regarding this, we recommend reading the work of the Lucy Easthope, a British expert and adviser on emergency planning and disaster recovery.  A great part of the management post-catastrophe is the removal of personal effects that may be returned to a bereaved family. “The item may have little or no monetary value but may mean everything to a grieving family; or to a survivor struggling to make sense of terrible events.” (Easthope, 2019). As we have seen in the Los Angeles wildfires, without an “ethic of care” from all responders, the personal effects are indiscriminately removed to landfill or even incinerated.

 “(…) response plans should therefore aim to prioritize personal effects with a principal aim to identify, locate and restore personal property in a timely and accurate manner that allows survivors and bereaved to make as many of their own choices as possible.” (Easthope, 2019).

It is recommended that strategies for devolution and restoration be devised to enable survivors to exercise decision-making authority over their valued possessions, which hold intrinsic and emotional significance. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London, 2020. 

Bohme, Gernot. The theory of atmospheres and its applications. Translated by A. Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul. In Interstices Journal of Architecture and Related Arts. Issue 15. 2014-03-18

Easthope, Lucy. The meaning of “things”. The evolution of an ethic of care in the return of personal effects after disaster 2001-2019. P. 122-128. In Bereavement Journal.org. 2019.

Howes, David. Sensorial Investigations. A history of the senses in anthropology, psychology, and law. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2023.

Morris, Charles. The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire. Told by Eye Witnesses. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, ca. 1906.

Telling, Gillian. “What They Grabbed in the L.A. Fires and Why: Tender Stories from Those Who Left Almost Everything Behind”. People.com. January 12^th, 2025.   

NOTE: this post is also published on AIA Los Angeles blog.

https://www.aialosangeles.org/news/news-and-blogs/

FIRE PREVENTION MODELIZATION AND USEFUL INTERACTIVE APPS

 

For citation, please see this publication on the American Institute of Architects 2025 blog as well.

Models are abstractions, idealizations of the “real” object.

A computerized simulation is generated by a software that intends to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. The computerized models were created in the II World War, with the purpose of simulating a nuclear detonation. After some years, the mathematical models proved to be very useful in the analysis of biological-natural, economical, social, technological, urban systems, among others. 

The models’ purpose is to find analytical solutions to real problems and predict the behavior of a system given a series of parameters and initial conditions. 

Computer fire modeling uses mathematical equations and computer algorithms for predictions of variable fire dynamics. It is essential to prevent fire damage and enhance the safety of people, buildings and environments.

The accuracy of fire modeling depends on the complexity of the model, the quality of input data and how sophisticated the software is. Here we summarize some of the most relevant.

An interesting experience is to work with Cellular Automata (CA). Originally designed by John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam  in the 1940’s, CA is a grid of cells that evolve over time according to rules that regulate how the cells change over time, depending on the state of neighboring cells. 

The free CA software Vision of Chaos developed by the company Chaos Group,  has a basic application focused on fire spread that could be useful to predict the behaviour of wildfire in a forest. It is a simulation that architects could use as a tool during the design process.

In September 2024, Dr Michael Gollner (associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley) and his team at the school’s Fire Research Lab, released a new type of model published  in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.  The researchers created digital models of the historical Tubbs and Thomas fires in the USA to understand their progression. The model’s predictions achieved an accuracy exceeding 85% for fire perimeters and around 70% for the damaged houses. This model is the first to fully reflect how fire moves through structures. (The Guardian US) 

 

The current scientific advances with the utilization of cross data from weather and hazard forecasting has allowed the transition from forecasting fire weather to actual fire activity.

On April 1st 2025 researchers from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) published a more complete modelization called Probability of Fire (PoF) in Nature Communications . The model uses satellite  data on fuel characteristics, ignitions, forecasts and observed fire activity to enhance its accuracy. It also adapts in real time to changing patterns of physical and human behaviors and has the potential to improve the prediction of wildfires. The most important aspect of this model is the incorporation of social interactions and human-influenced hazards, since humans are still modifying the environment.

An interactive map can be seen on pyrecast.org where we can select fuels, weather, risk and active fires. It allows all users, including homeowners and developers, to evaluate the fire hazard conditions of every lot in the USA. The following screenshots are from Los Angeles county and surroundings.

Fire prediction based on weather

Fire risk prediction based on statistics 

The map is supported with more information published on blogs and wildfires simulations on Pyregence.

Creek fire, 2020. From Pyregence.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which is part of UL Research Institutes, contributes with continuous research using large scale experiments in combination with softwares like Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) to explore fire behavior that is very difficult to understand during experiments. 

Setting aside sophisticated scientific models, we recommend the free App “Watch Duty” which contains real-time information relied on radio scanners, firefighters, reporters, government agencies and satellite data. Apart from the maps with different visualizations, the App provides evacuation zones, animal shelters, meal distribution locations, weather reports, notifications, emergency contact groups and preparation checklists.

We all know we have to coexist with fire. Both fire and egress modeling should be used by design and safety professionals to enhance protection, improve architectural design and emergency response strategies. 

Salton Sea: the beauty of ruins

 My eldest daughter has gone to Salton Sea and took these pictures. Both her and me are moved by the beauty of the ruins. "It's like a ghost town, " she explained to me. I was curious and so I read about the town's history in Wikipedia.org. The link is below to complete the reading.

All pictures by Vera Makianich, please do not reproduce without permission.

 The Salton Sea is a shallow, saline, endorheic rift lake located directly on the San Andreas Fault, predominantly in California's Imperial and Coachella Valleys. The lake occupies the lowest elevations of the Salton Sink in the Colorado Desert of Imperial and Riverside counties in Southern California. Like Death Valley, it is below sea level. Currently, its surface is 226 ft (69 m) below sea level. The deepest point of the sea is 5 ft (1.5 m) higher than the lowest point of Death Valley. The sea is fed by the New, Whitewater, and Alamo rivers, as well as agricultural runoff drainage systems and creeks. The Sea was created by a flood in 1905, in which water from the Colorado River flowed into the area. While it varies in dimensions and area with fluctuations in agricultural runoff and rainfall, the Salton Sea averages 15 mi (24 km) by 35 mi (56 km). With an average area of roughly 525 sq mi (1,360 km2), the Salton Sea is the largest lake in California. Average annual inflow is 1,360,000 acre·ft (1.68 km3), which is enough to maintain a maximum depth of 52 ft (16 m) and a total volume of about 7,500,000 acre·ft (9.3 km3). The lake's salinity, about 44 g/L, is greater than that of the waters of the Pacific Ocean (35 g/L), but less than that of the Great Salt Lake (which ranges from 50 to 270 g/L). The concentration increases by about 1 percent annually. (...) 

Accidental creation of the current Salton Sea

 In 1900, the California Development Company began construction of irrigation canals to divert water from the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, a dry lake bed. After construction of these irrigation canals, the Salton Sink became fertile for a time, allowing farmers to plant crops. Within two years, the Imperial Canal became filled with silt from the Colorado River. Engineers tried to alleviate the blockages to no avail. In 1905, heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning a set of headgates for the Alamo Canal. The resulting flood poured down the canal and breached an Imperial Valley dike, eroding two watercourses, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about 60 miles (97 km) long.

Over a period of approximately two years these two newly created rivers sporadically carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink. The Southern Pacific Railroad attempted to stop the flooding by dumping earth into the canal's headgates area, but the effort was not fast enough, and as the river eroded deeper and deeper into the dry desert sand of the Imperial Valley, a massive waterfall was created that started to cut rapidly upstream along the path of the Alamo Canal that now was occupied by the Colorado. This waterfall was initially 15 feet (4.6 m) high but grew to a height of 80 feet (24 m) before the flow through the breach was finally stopped. It was originally feared that the waterfall would recede upstream to the true main path of the Colorado, attaining a height of up to 100 to 300 feet (30 to 91 m), from where it would be practically impossible to fix the problem. As the basin filled, the town of Salton, a Southern Pacific Railroad siding, and Torres-Martinez Native American land were submerged. The sudden influx of water and the lack of any drainage from the basin resulted in the formation of the Salton Sea.

The continuing intermittent flooding of the Imperial Valley from the Colorado River led to the idea of the need for a dam on the Colorado River for flood control. Eventually, the federal government sponsored survey parties in 1922 that explored the Colorado River for a dam site, ultimately leading to the construction of Hoover Dam in Black Canyon, which was constructed beginning in 1929 and completed in 1935. The dam effectively put an end to the flooding episodes in the Imperial Valley.(...)

Environmental decline

The lack of an outflow means that the Salton Sea is a system of accelerated change. Variations in agricultural runoff cause fluctuations in water level (and flooding of surrounding communities in the 1950s and 1960s), and the relatively high salinity of the inflow feeding the Sea has resulted in ever increasing salinity. By the 1960s it was apparent that the salinity of the Salton Sea was rising, jeopardizing some of the species in it. The Salton Sea has a salinity exceeding 4.0% w/v (saltier than seawater) and many species of fish can no longer survive. It is believed that once the salinity surpasses 4.4% w/v, only the tilapia will survive. Fertilizer runoffs combined with the increasing salinity have resulted in large algal blooms and elevated bacteria levels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea

School shootings and modular classrooms

Needless to say how bad I feel about the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. 

Yesterday, we picked up our youngest girl from the High school and she told us her version of the shooting, which was explained by professors as soon as they learnt about it.

My daughter made a point about security; her school has approximately 3000 students. How to control them all? I remember the old times in our Faculty, the last months of the Junta Militar, when the police opened our bags, one by one, at the entrance. Only one entrance was open. 

Of course, this is a different case.

And sometimes the shooting is provoked by somebody who has direct access to the school, it could be anybody. It usually doesn´t happen in a compact building, the schools I´ve attended at the city of Buenos Aires, are designed with cloisters and there´s one main entrance, that´s it. A worker called ¨portero¨ is in charge to open the door, and a stranger, a parent, relative, friend, can never walk farther than the hall. Until the portero finds out if somebody is waiting for him/her. 

In extended cities in USA we have this layout of open schools. See the picture above that I´ve downloaded from The Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323297104578179271453737596.html#project%3DCONSHOOTsub1215

The kinder is isolated and, without ever being there, I can tell you that this building has multiple doors.

The next picture is from Harbor View Elementary School, in Huntington Beach. I know it very well, my daughter has attended this school.

And for one or two years, she was at the side construction, the one you see at the right. You can access these ¨modular rooms¨ from the street, from the avenue, from the park. I´ve done it myself, many times.

Teachers and student inside free standing modular rooms on campus are isolated.

I was asking my daughter about metal detectors at school and she answered, how do you think they can add them with so many doors?

I understand, a metal detector is not a final solution, shootings could happen even at the street. And we are not under military control.

Today, I´m scared and I´m wondering what the authorities will do to protect our children. Please keep in mind that it is too easy to acquire a gun in USA and something has to be done about it and -even worst- the illegal purchases of guns and similar weapons.

My condolences for the loss of so many, it´s so sad...

What architects can do after a natural disaster?

Furnishings on the streets of Red Hook, which suffered extensive flooding. Architezer.com

I am sharing an excerpt from an article in Architizer.com, just to pick up up the attention of architects and/or designers.

I have been lucky of not being in a natural disaster, apart from the huge storms in Buenos Aires, but I´m conscious that in catastrophes we shouldn´t be up on a pedestal just watching others work while thinking on the next competitions about the reconstruction of cities.

Up till now, the best example I´ve seen is this one, architects from New York, after Hurricane Sandy, helping in the aftermath, like anybody else.

Though, I still have noticed this issue of the licenses. The article clearly divides ¨architect with license¨ and designer (and the word could mean architect without license in USA). In my opinion, if experience is needed in catastrophes the authorities should ask for CVs-proof of expertise instead of licenses. This issue is clear in the context of the article.

Can architects put their services to use in the days and weeks following a natural disaster? We look at the Sandy-ravaged New York region as a case study.

 By C. J. Hughes

 More than two weeks ago, on October 29, Hurricane Sandy barreled ashore in the New York region, destroying what could end up being thousands of homes. But architects eager to help rebuild have little to do, at least when it comes to anything requiring their professional skills. At some point, designers who can determine a home’s structural damage will be needed, according to organizers of the relief operations in hard-hit coastal areas. But for now, these areas need volunteers who can clear debris, deliver food, and help people up and down darkened stairs. “There are still boats in people’s living rooms. There are still photo albums that belong to grandmothers that need to be salvaged. And this phase isn’t going away anytime soon,” says Thomas Thomas, a founder of Staten Island Strong, a relief group that has brought about 500 volunteers each weekend since the storm hit Staten Island’s South Shore. Continue. Thomas, who normally works on fashion shows and other events, hasn’t kept track of how many architects are in his crews, though he plans to create a database of members’ occupations soon. However, he suggests that any architects interested in rebuilding register with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to get properly ID’ed, so as to streamline the rebuilding process when it starts. “I can’t have just anyone walking in with a sledgehammer and taking out a load-bearing wall,” he says. FEMA didn’t return a call for comment.

John Cary, a design consultant who cofounded the nonprofit Public Architecture and runs the site Public Interest Design, agrees. (Cary also is a juror for the Architizer A+ Awards.) “There is a real need for people on the ground right now, and there will be for months,” says Cary, who has spent two weekends with Staten Island Strong stripping down houses to their studs to remove soggy dry wall and protect against mold. One potential hitch: Architects aren’t legally allowed to perform damage assessments as volunteers; New York doesn’t currently have any “good Samaritan” laws to protect them against any future lawsuits, like many states do. But Cary, who isn’t a licensed architect, hopes designers still pitch in with related tasks. “I would hate to think architects are sitting around because of lack of Good Sam laws,” he says.

KEEP ON READING:

http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/63057/are-architects-useful-in-the-immediate-aftermath-of-natural-disasters/#.UL1caYNX1WI

Seaside Park, New Jersey. After Sandy's devastation. Photo by Jo Hendley.

This picture reminds me Ray Bradbury's stories. Impressive

How to protect New York from future storms?

¨With the incredible destruction in New Jersey and New York, talk is now heating up about how to invest billions to make cities and coastal communities climate resilient and protect them from future storms. The innovative ideas of Dland studio to create wetlands around the city and landscape architect Kate Orff, ASLA, SCAPE, to mitigate storms with man-made oyster reefs were even just featured in a cover story in The New York Times, while the case for using green infrastructure to deal with heavy rain has now gotten more attention thanks to Kaid Benfield’s excellent piece. However, will policymakers now see the value of putting natural systems in place to address flooding and storm risks, or will New York City and others invest in expensive, “hard” infrastructure like sea walls that often fail to do the job of protecting people and property?

A 2009 report by the Army Corps of Engineer and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey looked at the feasibility of recreating 18,000 acres of tidal wetlands “on the margins of the islands and the coastline, [which] act like sponges, slowing and baffling tidal forces,” to replace the massive sea walls, which had actually taken the place of the original 300,000-acre wetlands in the outer boroughs of New York City. The problem the engineers were looking at: sea walls don’t actually function that well when protecting areas below sea level (see New Orleans and Katrina). The original perceived benefit of the sea walls was that they would enable more land to be developed closer to the water.

A proposal by Dland Studio and Architecture Research Office would put a set of wetlands around lower Manhattan and we would hope all the other boroughs. The New York Times writes: “To prevent incursions by water, Mr. Cassell and his planners imagined ringing Lower Manhattan with a grassy network of land-based parks accompanied by watery patches of wetlands and tidal salt marshes. At Battery Park, for instance, the marshes would weave through a series of breakwater islands made of geo-textile tubes and covered with marine plantings. On the Lower East Side of the island, Mr. Cassell and his team envisioned extending Manhattan by a block or two — with additional landfill — to create space for another new park and a salt marsh.” A complementary set of green streets would also boost absorptive capacity within the city.

Another exciting proposal by Orff would use oysters to create decentralized storm mitigation infrastructure in the low-lying Buttermilk Channel and Gowanus Bay that swelled and severely flooded some neighborhoods during the storm. Orff’s argument is that “the era of big infrastructure is over” and needs to be neighborhood-centric and actually embedded into daily life. The New York Timeswrites: “Ms. Orff’s proposal [...] envisions a system of artificial reefs in the channel and the bay built out of rocks, shells and fuzzy rope that is intended to nurture the growth of oysters (she calls them ‘nature’s wave attenuators’).” The reefs would also help clean the water: each oyster purifies an amazing 50 gallons of water a day. Students at a local NYC school have also picked up on the oysters idea and area doing their own experiments to see how they would work.¨

REFERENCE

http://dirt.asla.org/2012/11/12/with-hurricane-sandy-climate-change-is-back-on-the-agenda/#comment-19172

Three pictures from Venice flood

 People dressed in rain gear sit on chairs in a flooded St. Mark's Square in Venice earlier this month. Photograph by Manuel Silvestri, Reuters

 High floodwaters in Venice this weekend made the water levels in the city's canals and on the streets about even. Photograph by Manuel Silvestri, Reuters

 Venice flood. Photograph by Luigi Costantini, Associated Press

Shared from National Geographic.com 

Though the flood must be problematic, I think the pictures are beautiful. And it must be a great experience to walk the flooded streets, while it´s not dangerous.

The exhibition Design without Borders – Creating Change

WHEELCHAIRS FOR CHILDREN: Design without Borders has collaborated with the Guatemalan foundation Transiciones on the development of a wheelchair for children in Guatemala. Photo: Norsk Form/Kjersti Gjems Vangberg

Location: DogA, Oslo

Thursday 20. September 2012 - Sunday 02. December 2012

Free admission

The exhibition Design without Borders – Creating Change shows how designers contribute to creating social change in developing countries. Mine clearing equipment, wheelchairs for children in Guatemala, ecological urinal for slum areas and computers for young people living in villages. Design without Borders has for more than ten years developed products for and with developing countries and connected designers from the South with Norwegian companies. The objective is to create good, inexpensive solutions that can be produced locally. The exhibition Design without borders – Creating Change presents the products and solutions in the local context for which they have been created. The ecological urinal has been placed in a slum setting, and the wheelchair can be tried out on a cobblestone street. You can try out the new mine-clearing equipment while actually searching for mines and inside an emergency shelter you will find an earthquake simulator. Just as important as the finished products is Design without Borders’ work method. Through text, photos, and videos the exhibition communicates the important design process that lies behind the products.

TOILET SOLUTION: The ecological urinal developed by Design without Borders and SuSan-Design is odor-free and hygienic. A family in the slums of Nairobi is testing the new urinal. Photo: Kjersti Gjems Vangberg

Keep on reading:

http://norskform.no/en/Calendar/Exhibits/2012/Design-without-Borders/

A proposed "greening" of Lower Manhattan to absorb storm surges, designed by Stephen 

Cassell, Adam Yarinski, and Susannah C. Drake for the exhibition Rising Currents, Museum 

of Modern Art, 2010. ARO/dlandstudio/Museum of Modern Art

" As we contemplate the horrific damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, the world of design may seem remote from our most immediate concerns. Yet the urgent needs that follow large-scale catastrophes—the need for shelter, clean water, alternative sources of power—can be particularly conducive to creative solutions. I recently observed that breakthroughs in architecture and industrial design have emerged during wartime; now a remarkable new exhibition in Oslo shows that the same can hold true for natural disasters as well.

Presented by Norsk Form, the Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway, Design Without Borders (the title is an obvious nod to Médecins Sans Frontières) presents realistic mock-ups of fourteen problem-solving design initiatives—ranging from post-hurricane relief to land-mine removal—in Norsk Form’s DogA exhibition space, which occupies a cavernous turn-of-the-twentieth-century power station in Oslo. For example, a life-size replica of a post-disaster shelter features insulated walls made from empty plastic beverage bottles stacked and held in place with chicken wire within wooden frameworks.

According to Leif Verdu-Isachsen, who organized the exhibition and edited its engaging catalog with Truls Ramberg,

After a natural disaster, we have about a two-week window of opportunity in which to engage the global public before its attention shifts elsewhere, so what we do has to be implemented very quickly. Furthermore, we know that on average these shelters will need to be used for about three years before permanent housing can be built, so the combination of rapid assembly and relative durability is essential."

REFERENCE: Martin Filler. Design from Disasters
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/nov/05/design-from-natural-disasters/

The destruction of Aleppo, Syria. A Unesco world heritage site

A fire rages at a medieval souk in Aleppo, Syria, in an image taken from Shaam News Network video. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Picture downloaded from hindu.com

A huge fire has destroyed parts of the medieval souks in Aleppo, Syria, following raging battles between rebels and government troops.

The city is a Unesco world heritage site and the labyrinth of narrow alleys and shops was once a major tourist attraction and is one of Syria's largest commercial hubs.

Over the past two months, the city, home to 2.5 million people, has become a focus of the insurgency against Bashar al-Assad's regime, with near daily fighting and shelling.

Activists posted online videos which showed the fire around wooden doors and shops and a pall of smoke hanging over the city on Saturday.

Ahmad al-Halabi, an activist based in Aleppo, said residents were struggling to control the blaze with a limited number of fire extinguishers and low water supply: "It's a disaster. The fire is threatening to spread to remaining shops," he said. "It is a very difficult and tragic situation there."

The souks of Aleppo, a maze of vaulted passageways with shops that sell everything from foods to fabrics, perfumes, spices and artisan souvenirs, are a tactical prize for the combatants. They lie beneath the city's towering citadel where activists say regime troops and snipers have taken up positions.

Many of the shops have wooden doors, and clothes, fabrics and leather wares inside helped spread the fire, activists said.

Rebels and government troops have roughly controlled half of the city each since the offensive began in August.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/29/medieval-aleppo-souks-fire-syria

Old town Syria. Aleppo. From news.nationalgeographic.com

Destroyed Aleppo. From http://www.enduringamerica.com/home/2012/9/29/syria-and-beyond-live-coverage-political-drift-in-new-york-m.html

Destroyed Aleppo. From Worldtv.com