magazine no. 28

Magazine No. 28

Thank You, I´ll Do It Myself
No. 28 - Thank You, I´ll Do It Myself
- page 02
  Cover
  Thank You, I´ll Do It Myself
- page 03
  Editorial
  Thank You, I´ll Do It Myself
- page 05 - 13
  DIY Cities
  Justin McGuirk on citizen agency and government accountability
- page 14
  This New Technology
  Analogue 3D printer by Daniel de Bruin
- page 15 - 22
  Got Wood?
  Vintage DIY "cabin porn" from 1960
- page 23
  Hexayurt
  Downloadable disaster relief
- page 24 - 29
  The SAAL Experiment
  Participatory architecture in Portugal, 1974-1976
- page 30
  One Week
  Buster Keaton does-it-himself in 1920
- page 31 - 35
  Best of the Makers
  By Daniel Charny
- page 36
  Technological Disobedience
  Ernesto Oroza’s machineries of crisis
- page 37 - 40
  Self-Planned, Self-Managed
  A model for affordable, quality housing in Berlin
- page 41
  Phonebloks
  A smarter smartphone
- page 42 - 49
  Same, Same but Different
  Self-help architecture in Sudan by Raul Pantaleo
- page 50 - 53
  Needs Must
  Walter Segal’s self-build system
- page 54 - 55
  Bookmarked
  Guest Reviewer: Freek Lomme
- page 56
  Freehand
  Planet DIY by Mattias Adolfsson
- page 57
  Next
  After Dark
- uncube's editors are Sophie Lovell (Art Director, Editor-in-Chief), Florian Heilmeyer, Rob Wilson and Elvia Wilk; editorial assistance: Fiona Shipwright; graphic design: Lena Giavanazzi; graphics assistance: Madalena Guerra. uncube is based in Berlin and is published by BauNetz, Germany's most-read online portal covering architecture in a thoughtful way since 1996.
  
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DIY – the act of repairing or making something oneself without the help of experts or professionals – might seem anachronistic to the traditional architect. Yet at a time when the collective sense of self, driven by technology, is in the process of redefinition, the appeal of self-empowerment through self-reliance remains strong.

The vast majority of buildings on this planet are, and always have been, constructed without the involvement of architects. Just as designers are finding ways of creating products and services beyond set manufacturing models, so too are architects finding ways to incorporate DIY thinking and practice into their methods.

It’s time to stop talking and start doing.

The editors
Cover image: March 11th Co-operative, Olhão, Portugal (Photo: Manuel Dias, 1975)
On citizen agency and government accountability

By Justin McGuirk
Design critic and curator Justin McGuirk challenges the zeitgeist ideal of the “user-generated city”, compares northern and southern iterations of DIY urbanism and argues that now, more than ever, citizens need to push for government accountability.

In 2011, in the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution, a community in Cairo built itself four access ramps to the city’s 45-mile ring road. Living in an informal neighbourhood, residents of Al-Mu’tamidiya had long been bypassed and so they took matters into their own hands. There is no denying their initiative or resourcefulness. We are used to squatter-citizens building their own homes but DIY infrastructure is still seen as somehow beyond the pale. It is no wonder that the Al-Mu’tamidiya ramps have been celebrated as a triumph of grassroots empowerment. At a conference I attended earlier this year, one speaker hailed them as “the wikicity” as if such a notion were the embodiment of progress – an idea so self-evidently appealing that no digital native could possibly demur.

It may be instructive to remind ourselves that what those access ramps also represent is long-term governmental neglect and a case of civic opportunism during a moment of political turmoil. In these respects, the Al-Mu’tamidiya initiative is only a more extreme example of the condition in which cities around the world now find themselves. As we continue to dismantle social democracy, and as private corporations line up to replace the retreating state, there is a sense that perhaps, just perhaps, a more benign force might start to exert itself. I’m talking, of course, about us.
Previous page: An exit ramp serving the Al-Mu’tamidiya neighbourhood in the northwestern area of Greater Cairo. (Photo: Paolo Patelli / La Jetée)
It is eminently clear why the idea of the user-generated city fits the early twenty-first century zeitgeist – the question is whether we really believe it.

When it comes to notions of the DIY city, it seems to me that we are talking about two separate but mutually supporting phenomena. The first is, broadly speaking, technologically driven and perhaps even utopian. To speak of user-generated cities is merely to speak, very loosely, the language of the internet. It is only a small imaginative leap from social networks, “Twitter revolutions” and open-source platforms to participative, networked urbanism. By that logic, the city is merely an extension of so much other digital creativity, like distributed manufacturing but with cement mixers instead of 3D printers.

The other phenomenon is not technologically driven and is far, far more real. As it stands, more than a billion people live in slums, and that figure is projected to be two billion by 2030. Across the planet, squatters build more housing than all the governments and developers put together. In the global south, where most urban growth is taking place – to the tune of 60 million new urbanites a year – the DIY city is a fact of life. The mega cities of the future are not being planned, they are being self-built. All of which leads to the conclusion that the cities of the north desire and would benefit from more citizen agency, while the cities of the south desperately need more government support. In other words, there is such a thing as too much of the so-called “bottom-up” impulse we tend to romanticise, and not enough of the “top-down” intervention we tend to vilify.
»Across the planet, squatters build more housing than all the governments and developers put together.«
The ramps built by Al-Mu’tamidiya residents provide much-needed access to Cairo’s ring road. (Photo: Paolo Patelli / La Jetée)
The celebration of grassroots urban initiatives has a long history. One of the first to defend squatter settlements was the English architect John Turner, who cited Lima’s barriadas as exemplars of how to empower the urban poor.

The self-built shack, argued Turner, was often more useful to squatters than a flat in a modernist tower block because it gave them more control over their own lives, and they could expand as their families grew. Turner’s argument was later abused by the forces of neoliberalism, which withdrew housing from governments’ purview and made it a matter for the market. Indeed, not even Turner anticipated the scale that the barrios and favelas of Latin America would later assume.
Artwork by JR in the Favela Morro da Providência, Rio de Janeiro. (Photo: JR)
Three decades of laissez-faire urbanism have had a disastrous effect, giving rise to deeply segregated cities where millions live without basic services such as public transport, sewerage and often running water. One can make the case that slums or squatter settlements have been remarkably successful devices for incorporating millions of people into cities, and providing access to the opportunities of urban living. However, one cannot lose sight of the deprivations that accompany spontaneous urbanism on such a scale.

It is a truism that while people can build themselves homes and entire communities, they cannot build themselves a transport network. For that, traditionally at least, one needs government. The complexity and cost of urban infrastructure have thus far defined the outer limits of self-organisation. And even if citizens can build a modicum of urban infrastructure, such as that Cairo community, it is onerous that they should have to. In the manner of this diametric relationship between the northern and southern conceptions of the DIY metropolis, European cities face their own scale problems. There is a reason why all these articles and conferences mostly illustrate their point with allotment gardens and not solutions to the housing crisis. It is the same reason why exhortations to “hack the city” result in swings hanging from bridges and trees with crocheted trunk warmers. There are notable exceptions, such as Campo de Cebada, a locally managed public event space in Madrid, but it goes without saying that self-organisation beyond a certain scale is painfully difficult. It requires tools for turning debate and dissensus into consensus and results.
»It turns out that government has its uses, as much as the “there’s an app for that” brigade in Silicon Valley would have you believe otherwise.«
Sports Colosseum for The IX South American Sports Games in Medellín by MAZZANTI architects and PLANB architects. (Photo: Cristobal Palma)
Public funding comes in handy too, though in the age of crowd funding that may not be essential. One of the more interesting platforms designed to aid that process was Helsinki Design Lab’s Brickstarter, a Kickstarter for public spaces, and even that one could not call democratic. It turns out that government has its uses, as much as the “there’s an app for that” brigade in Silicon Valley would have you believe otherwise.

I’ve argued elsewhere that, in the global south at least, architects have a valuable role to play in connecting bottom-up impulses with top-down resources and strategic planning. As a social connector, the architect can channel the community’s voice into strategies – a cable car network, say – and then lobby municipalities into making them a reality.
Orquideorama, located in Medellin’s Botanical Gardens, designed by JPRCR arquitectos and Plan B Arquitectura. (Photo: Sergio Gomez)
- Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design critic of The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. His book Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture is published by Verso.
  
  justinmcguirk.com
  versobooks.com
But it is far more productive when governments are proactive themselves. The case that best illustrates that fact is Medellín in Colombia. It has been widely celebrated for transforming what was once the murder capital of the world with a programme of new public spaces, schools and libraries. Medellín’s “social urbanism” succeeded because various sectors of the population – politicians, architects, the business community and the barrio communities – collaborated. But the politicians were absolutely instrumental. As the state continues to sell off its responsibilities, the optimists out there argue that our new networking tools will ultimately shift the balance of power to citizens themselves. Firstly, this paradigm-shift rhetoric is still some way ahead of reality. Secondly, such rhetoric plays into the hands of neoliberals – witness the UK government’s aborted “Big Society” motif, which was merely a cover for yet more privatisation. Instead of calls for citizen agency being allowed to let governments off the hook, I would argue that such participative impulses should be heaping pressure on government to do its job. We need these network tools not only to give citizens a greater say in the process of urban change but also to make governments more accountable. I

About Justin McGuirk
- Daniel de Bruin is a student at the University of the Arts in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Earlier this year, in a bid to reclaim the feeling of creative ownership from encroaching technological automisation, he built This New Technology , a machine he claims is the world’s first mechanical 3D printer.
  
  “3D printing allows me to create products more swiftly and more efficiently than ever. But these products don’t feel mine. They are merely a product of this new technology. I love technology but how can I reclaim ownership of my work? Perhaps by building the machine that produces the work. Perhaps by physically powering the machine, which I built, that produces the work. In the hope of rediscovering the sense of having created something, I create.” p (sl)
  
  danieldebruin.com
This New Technology

Analogue 3D printer by Daniel de Bruin
Video courtesy Daniel de Bruin
Got
Vintage DIY “cabin porn” from 1960
?
Wood
To the uninitiated, the term “cabin porn” might suggest that something risqué is going on in the woods, but actually, most people experience the phenomenon far from the wilderness, instead (like with most types of porn these days) stumbling across the cabins on a plethora of subreddits and tumblr blogs. In 2014, cabin porn has become the preferred mode of escapism for thousands of enthusiasts longing for that Scandinavian log aesthetic you just can’t quite recreate within the environs of a 14th-floor studio flat. And for those who do want to head into the forest, there are plenty of crash courses in DIY-ing it; head to Beaver Brook School (tagline: “Learn Wild”) in upstate New York and you can learn to make your own as part of its “rustic timber-framing” workshop.

Yet the desire to construct a cabin of one’s own predates both hipsters and newsfeeds. Behold The Douglas Fir Plywood Association Second Homes for Leisure Living catalogue, published in 1960. Presenting 18 new “leisure-time” homes for both “comfort and economy”, this relentlessly cheerful tome includes plans for models such as the “Intriguing Cabin in the Woods”, the “Two-Stage Expandable Vacationer”, and of course the “Up-in-a-Jiffy Vacation Cabin”.

With this wealth of pro-tips for the aspiring cabin-builder at your fingertips, such as “keep it simple”, “use a smooth, fused-resin overlay for better paint-ability”, and our favourite “warm natural tones of plywood create an atmosphere of relaxed informality”, why cling to a log-based fantasy when wood-veneered reality could be yours? After all, as the DFPA so enthusiastically points out, one million American cabin-owning families can’t be wrong: leisure living is twice the fun in a second home! (fs)
"Cross" shape of cabin permits proper orientation

of cabin to sun and breezes.
There’s room for lots of leisure living in this spacious
downstairs living room. Bedrooms are upstairs with private entrance.
Plenty of outdoor deck space — completely separate living and utility areas are outstanding features of this floor plan.
The Ranger’s living room is oriented to take full advantage of the view,
with lots of windows facing onto the spacious deck area.
Designer’s eye-view shows how maximum livability can be planned
into minimum space. Bath features handy outside entrance.
Area behind low couch is for storage, accessible from outside
Bright, airy interior provides maximum room for relaxing,
keeping utility areas to a minimum without sacrificing convenience.
Bedrooms are upstairs with private entrance.
- Based on Buckminster Fuller’s ingenious yet difficult to build Geodesic Dome, the Hexayurt is a disaster relief structure that is easy to assemble from standard 4x8-foot sheets of construction material such as foam and plywood, for about 1,000 USD. Self-defined “Global Resilience Guru” Vinay Gupta invented the design in 2002. He then made it available online for anyone to download, build, modify, and improve upon. Though Gupta envisions the shelter as a solution for the homeless, so far its most widespread application has been at the annual Burning Man festival. p (ew)
  
  hexayurt.com
Hexayurt

Downloadable Disaster Relief
(Photo: Flickr/Marion Hannah, video: Jim Stone)
Political upheaval leaves cracks in the foundations of a society. But alongside the loss of stability, sometimes radical change (at the end of a fascist regime, for example) also creates a space for radical experimentation – which can require dropping social or professional boundaries and just “doing it together”.

One such unique project in 1970s Portugal was called SAAL. It may have been short-lived, but it marked a fundamental shift in the evolution of architecture as social practice.

Participatory architecture in Portugal, 1974-1976
»We are the hand of the people.«

- Álvaro Siza

The SAAL housing programme in Portugal was officially launched just after the 25 April Revolution in 1974, which overthrew the totalitarian Estado Novo regime and brought half a century of fascist dictatorship to an end. An acronym for Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local, or “Local Ambulatory Support Service”, SAAL was conceived and implemented by the architect Nuno Portas, then the Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Planning in Portugal’s first Provisional Government. Its purpose was to support people who lived in precarious conditions; at the time Portugal suffered from a shortfall of about 600,000 homes, with 25 percent of the population living below the minimum conditions for comfort, security, health and privacy. SAAL was intended as an assisted self-build model, in which residents would take part in building their own homes.

Portas led the ambitious but short-lived adventure from August 1974 to October 1976. Architects including Portas himself, Alexandre Alves Costa, Álvaro Siza Vieira and Gonçalo Byrne teamed up in brigades throughout the country, working directly with the people via neighbourhood associations. Unlike the initial intention of the programme, SAAL turned into a rapid process, with ungovernable dimensions, that went way beyond the original intentions of its initiators, involving various independent energies, tools and rules all over the country. In the end, there was not one SAAL; there were many.

Portugal’s new-born democracy manifested itself in urbanism and housing politics. Major demonstrations and the occupation of houses – mostly municipal projects under construction – defined everyday life across the country in the aftermath of the revolution. “Casas sim, barracas não!” (“Houses yes, shacks no!”) was one of the collective proclamations.
Previous page: SAAL demonstration. (Photo: Architect Alexandre Alves Costa archive)
The demonstrations and informal assemblies were primarily led by women, who demanded dignified living conditions and discussing floor plans – effectively claiming housing as a female issue. Portas soon appointed the female architect Maria Proença as Director of the SAAL operations.

The risk of aggressive far-right reaction against the project was constant. Reactions ranged from boycotts to sabotage attempts by local authorities and landlords, including death threats against members of the Residents’ Committees. In January 1976 a bomb attack destroyed the Porto office of SAAL and two months later the car of the architect Alexandre Alves Costa was destroyed in another bombing. A counter-revolution ended the SAAL project in October 1976. Despite public demonstrations against its termination, an official order was issued for it to be “integrated” into municipal governments.

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1. “Antas” neighbourhood, designed by Pedro Ramalho, as it is today. (Photo: Photo: André Cepeda)
2. Architects at one of the project sites
3. SAAL Intervention Leal neighbourhood, Porto. (Photo: Architect Alexandre Alves Costa archive)
4. Bouça neighbourhood in Porto designed by Álvaro Siza. (Photo: Fernando Guerra | FG + SG)
5. Construction of the “São Vítor” neighbourhood began in October 1975 and was designed by Álvaro Siza‚ Domingos Tavares‚ Francisco Guedes‚ Adalberto Dias and Eduardo Souto Moura.
6. SAAL assembly meeting in Oeiras neighbourhood, 1976. (Photo: Albano Pereira)

6.
»The risk of aggressive far-right reaction against the project was constant.«
SAAL Intervention in Francos, Porto‚ 1975-1976‚ by Rolando Torgo. (Photo: Architect Alexandre Alves Costa archive)
- The SAAL Process: Architecture and Participation, 1974-1976
  
  In 2014 the Serralves Museum for Contemporary Art in Lisbon produced the first major exhibition on SAAL. The exhibition “The SAAL Process: Architecture and Participation, 1974-1976” presented 10 exemplary built projects in architectural models, historical photographs, sound recordings and film documentaries of the time. It also featured a contemporary reflection on the current state of some SAAL projects by photographers André Cepeda, José Pedro Cortes and Daniel Malhão. The exhibition was shown at the Serralves in 2014/2015, and at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal until 4 October 2015.
  
  seralves.pt
By then, “169 operations were active throughout the country, involving 41,665 families of poor residents. 2,259 new houses were under construction and there were over 5,741 in the planning stages”, according to scholar José António Bandeirinha.

None of the SAAL operations were fully completed. Many of them now lie forgotten and buried within in the urban tissue. Some, however, are now being revisited. For instance, Álvaro Siza’s SAAL-related project, the “Bouça” neighbourhood, was finally completed in 2006, after being abandoned in 1978 with two of its four blocks unbuilt. Despite its untimely end, SAAL remains a unique example of an alternative form of dialogue between architects and inhabitants. It transformed the perception of many architects with respect to the social function of their profession – in Portugal and beyond. I (Julia Albani)

About The Saal Process
SAAL Intervention in Lapa, Porto‚ 1974-1976‚ by Alfredo Matos Ferreira and Beatriz Madureira. (Photo: Architect Alexandre Alves Costa archive)
- This 1920 classic short movie features Sybil Seely and Buster Keaton as two newlyweds who receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. Yet “Handy Hank”, the man that Sybil’s character has previously turned down for marriage, re-numbers the packing crates… the resulting truly unique DIY home survives a major storm only to (spoiler alert) meet its demise on the nearby rail tracks, after Keaton discovers that he accidentally built it on the wrong site and tries to move it. Keaton’s inspiration sprang from watching the short movie Home Made, produced in 1919 by the Ford Motor Company to advertise their brand new pre-fab houses for American families. p (fh)
One Week

Buster Keaton did it himself in 1920
“One Week”‚ directed by Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline‚ 1920
When DIY culture met web culture it exploded into the networked era with the rapidly evolving Maker movement from the mid 2000s, infusing the spirit of self-building with the power of emerging technologies. Whilst Makers as a whole have no single cause or goal, massive communities have formed around the principles of empowerment via tech. These include purely online communities, physical hackerspaces and so-called Fab Labs.

In order to get a picture of some of the most exciting Maker initiatives across the spectrum, from high- to very low-tech, who better to ask than Daniel Charny? In 2012 Charny co-founded the open design platform Fixperts, which pairs the knowledge of designers with those who need help fixing everyday problems. Morevoer, in 2011 Charny curated the now-legendary exhibition Power of Making at the V&A, where he integrated a Maker space into the museum – finding another way to unite knowledge with initiative to produce agency. For uncube he has chosen four of his favourite DIY projects and explained what makes them important.
Daniel Charny's

Best of the Makers
Maker Faire Africa

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Billed as “the greatest show-and-tell on earth”, Maker Faires are a hybrid of science and craft gatherings, one of the Maker community’s most important events for movers and shakers. Created by the Make magazine team to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset”, its evolution has behaved more like a movement than a franchise. Independent satellites have developed their own strands, such as the exemplary entrepreneurial Maker Faire Africa organisation, whose vision is to take ingenuity, invention and innovation as routes to empowerment and new socio-economic forms of manufacturing across that continent.

makerfaireafrica.com
School pupils repurposing an engine during the Maker Faire Africa 2012 event in Lagos‚ Nigeria. (Photo: Flickr/ Erik (HASH) Hersman, CC-BY)
Sanitary Pad Machine

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The “low-cost sanitary pad movement”, as described by the inventor of these machines, is a DIY story with social and cultural significance. In 1998 an uneducated Indian man named Arunachalam Muruganantham began the four-year process of inventing a machine that would allow women anywhere to produce their own sanitary pads cheaply and easily. Given that roughly 70 percent of all reproductive diseases in India are cause by poor menstrual hygiene and that only around 10 percent of Indian women use sanitary products, Muruganantham’s project has been as much an awareness-raising campaign as an invention. The low-cost machines are now operated in more than 1,300 villages, often by women. The economies that develop, sometimes barter-based, create a closer relationship between makers, sellers and users.

menstrualman.com

Image: “Menstrual Man” documentary poster‚ as designed by Seah Kui Luan. Video: Trailer for the documentary‚ directed by Amit Virmani, 2013
Project Daniel

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Project Daniel is an inspiring user-focused application of digitech that provides the technology for amputees to 3D print their own arms, hands and fingers. Born out of the “help one, help many” philosophy, it began as a one-off project called Robohand, that a South African carpenter, Richard Van As, created for himself after he lost four fingers in an accident. Then the nonprofit group Not Impossible Labs picked up on his idea and helped introduce it to other communities. It has turned into an outreach programme to become one of the world’s first 3D printing prosthetic lab and training facilities, making the technology cheap and accessible enough to actually benefit those who need it most. The initiative is named after Daniel Omar, a double amputee in South Sudan who was the first recipient of one of the prosthetic arms.

notimpossiblelabs.com
Daniel Omar (right) with a fellow amputee who has benefited from the initiative. (Photo: Timoteo Freccia)
- Daniel Charny is a creative director, curator and design educator. He is co-founder and director of From Now On, whose clients include the British Council, Design Museum, Heatherwick Studio and Cathedral Group. Founding curator of Aram Gallery, he has also curated major design shows including Power of Making at the V&A, which was their most visited free exhibition since 1950 and included one of the first programmed maker-spaces in a museum context. Charny has been involved in design education for 20 years including as Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art and is currently Professor of Design at Kingston University. Since 2012 he is co-founder and director of Fixperts, an open design creative platform, now active in 16 countries.
  
  fromnowon.co.uk
  
  fixperts.org
WikiHouse

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This clever jigsaw-puzzle construction system inspired by traditional Korean architecture was initially presented at the Gwangju Biennale in 2011 by a group of designers and engineers. Their WikiHouse prototype was set to start a disruptive debate and challenge landowners, urban planners and policy makers to think about alternatives mass-produced housing. WikiHouse has since become an ongoing experiment in opening the potential of digital technology to change how buildings are designed and constructed on a global scale. A user can download a building plan from the website, customise the design with SketchUp, and then cut the pattern from plywood using a CNC router. The frame is said to be easy to assemble by anyone in less than a day. I

wikihouse.cc
WikiHouse 3D-printable‚ open-source construction plans. (Images: courtesy WikiHouse)
About Daniel Charny
- 1989 saw the beginning of the Special Period (Período especial) in Cuba, an era defined by an economic crisis that extended well into the late 1990s. Período especial also saw the publication of a book entitled With Our Own Efforts (Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos). Put together by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, the book was in effect an open-source manual detailing how ordinary citizens could create, repair and hack all manner of everyday items and appliances. Inspired by the innovation that flourished during the crisis, Cuban artist, designer and theorist Ernesto Oroza has spent the last year collecting the fruits of such labours and coined a term to describe the approach: technological disobedience. p (fs)
  
  ernestooroza.com
Technological Disobedience

Ernesto Oroza’s Machines For Crisis
Photo: Ernesto Orozo, video: Vice/Motherboard ©2014 VICE Media LLC
A model for affordable, quality housing in Berlin
Rising rents are endangering the basic character and atmosphere of Berlin. When empty inner-city plots are sold for maximum prices, urban life gets monetarised and thus loses the heterogeneity that earned this city worldwide acclaim. The local housing project Spreefeld, however, demonstrates a different strategy for producing new yet affordable apartments in a sought-after location right by the river Spree. By including public and semi-public facilities within its scheme it also offers a way of preserving and supporting much needed social diversity.

Three Berlin architecture offices teamed up for this recently completed co-op project: Silvia Carpaneto, fatkoehl and BARarchitects, with project management by a group called die Zusammenarbeiter. The development contains 44 apartments in three buildings dotted loosely over the site in order to provide as many apartments as possible with a direct view of the river.
(All photos: Ute Zscharnt; photos and drawings courtesy die Zusammenarbeiter - Gesellschaft von Architekten mbH)
Right from the beginning, the design process involved the future inhabitants, organised as a cooperative, who owned and managed the site and the buildings. This made the design process long and relatively complicated, yet it also led to very specific, non-standard solutions.

The final development features a heterogeneous range of apartment types (from 54 to 290 square metres) and also includes three huge “cluster apartments” for shared living (580 to 705 square metres). The Spreefeld project also offers an equally broad range of shared facilities, including communal gardens, terraces, sauna and fitness room. The ground floor contains additional “optional spaces” for which residents can suggest ideas that will be voted on by the co-op – so even after completion, the community will continue to decide about the communal use of their estate.
- The co-operative project Spreefeld was initiated, programmed and managed by die Zusammenarbeiter – Gesellschaft von Architekten mbH. The three architecture offices involved were Silvia Carpaneto (leading architect), fatkoehl architects and BARarchitects. They are all based in Berlin.
  
  spreefeldberlin.de
  zusammenarbeiter.de
  carpanetoschoeningh.de
  fatkoehl.com
  bararchitekten.de
This housing project shows that it is possible to build individual apartment types that the free market would never produce. At the same time it offers the luxury of communal facilities that the owners would not have been able to afford individually. And all this at a price way below Berlin’s current average cost for newly built apartments. I (fh)

Read more about Berlin’s co-op community builders in uncube’s interview with die Zusammenarbeiter member Christian Schöningh here.

About Spreefeld
- Phonebloks is an independent organisation that encourages the development of products that produce less electronic waste – starting with your phone. The whole thing began with a video describing the concept of a modular phone with replaceable components, which reached nearly 400 million people via social media. While there are no plans for the phone to be built as of yet, the success of the idea is in the awareness it has raised for the need for change in the electronics industry. I (ew)
  
  phonebloks.com
PhoneBloks

A smarter smartphone
Illustration and video courtesy Phonebloks
Self-help architecture in Sudan

By Raul Pantaleo, translated by Simon Turner
Raul Pantaleo is a member of the Italian architecture practice Tamassociati Architects. He has 18 years of experience in designing and building sustainable humanitarian projects in some of the toughest and most strife-ridden areas in the world. That means addressing, on an everyday basis, the process of empowerment through participatory self-help in the context of building. For uncube he describes, in his own words, the practical reality of building a clinic in Sudan, working together with refugees and local nomads.
Previous page: The “Emergency” paediatric clinic in Port Sudan‚ designed by Tamassociati and completed in 2012. This page: illustration by Marta Gerardi‚ courtesy Tamassociati Architects. (All photos courtesy Massimo Grimaldi Emergency).
The desert gives no quarter in the summer: it is violent, merciless and unfit for any form of life. On the shores of the Red Sea, Port Sudan lies between desert and sea. A port city of strategic importance for the whole of Sudan, its population has grown dramatically, rising in less than a decade from 30,000 at the turn of the century to nearly 500,000 in 2007. And it is still rising today. This dramatic expansion is mainly due to the influx of huge numbers of refugees from the wars that have plagued the region for years, added to which has been the settlement of Beja nomads due to the frequent droughts in the area.
»Poverty and war can destroy traditional crafts built up over the centuries, making these places almost incapable of building their own future.«
Port Sudan, located on Sudan’s northeastern coast.
This is where our practice built the Italian paediatric clinic for the Italian NGO “Emergency”. It was a long and complex task, to a great extent due to the difficult social and environmental conditions, but especially to the limited technical skills available in the area. In this corner of Africa, we had first-hand experience of how poverty and war can destroy traditional crafts developed over the centuries, making these places almost incapable of building their own futures.

As usual in the case of Emergency projects, we tried right from the start to build the clinic using local labour and materials, but after just a few attempts to work with local companies we found they were unable to ensure the level of quality we needed. We therefore decided to go for self-construction, creating a company from scratch with refugees and local Beja nomads, as well as with Emergency staff. We adopted a participatory approach because we rejected the idea that companies should be brought in from the capital or, worse still, from abroad. We were well aware, however, that we would come up against harsh reality and find that the workers were often illiterate and sometimes lacked even the most basic practical skills – such as using a pair of pliers or a screwdriver.

The building site thus turned into a crafts workshop and, at the same time, a social laboratory where the local communities personally helped create a work of public utility. The project started out as a training course in the very basics of construction for the group of refugees who had embarked on the enterprise. It was a long and tiring process, but it was ultimately crowned by the satisfaction of having managed to self-build almost the entire clinic (excluding the technical areas). This meant starting from the main structure, the brick vaults and the walls in coral stone, and ending with the mashrabiya, the typical wooden latticework sunscreen found in all Islamic countries and commonly occuring in Port Sudan. This artefact turned out to be the greatest challenge, and it is the story of this particular object that I wish to tell.
We became interested in the mashrabiya while preparing the site, as we were curious about its historical legacy from seeing it on so many buildings in the town centre. We studied and analysed the objects for months, ultimately preferring them to aluminium sunscreens because they are perfect thermal machines capable of keeping out direct sunlight as well as the prying eyes of the world. They are simple and effective, and have a powerful cultural and functional identity.

So we set them into the architecture of our hospital as a sign of respect for local traditions, but also as a challenge to our ability to build something that elegant by ourselves. An experienced carpenter would have no trouble making these panels, but for our group of apprentices it was a nigh impossible task. From the outset, our work was strongly influenced not only by the refugees’ total lack of experience but also, and especially, by their different ways of perceiving space, reality and time – in particular, their different way of viewing the concept of precision.

We spent months in the site workshop, trying to build eight mashrabiya all exactly the same. That meant adjusting, enlarging and re-doing the same piece over and over again. But often our apprentice carpenters could not see the difference between making twenty horizontal strips or making twenty-one, or between panels of four metres and panels of four metres and five centimetres. This was partly because, lacking basic numeracy, they often just tried to make an approximate copy.
Construction of the project was undertaken by refugees and Beja nomads from the local area.
In the rudimentary language of the site, using gestures and English mixed with Arabic, they seemed perplexed by our idea of precision. “Same, same but different!”, they kept repeating. It was hard to explain that it had to be exactly equal, not just more or less equal. But around here, precision, in our terms, is an abstract concept.

Still, even in Ancient Greece, one of the cultures associated with the birth of mathematics, precision was considered to be the prerogative of the gods: humans are allowed an imperfect world, because we are ourselves imperfect. So in Classical buildings, the distances between columns were approximated or measured in tens of centimetres – and this was not just a matter of chance.
Installation of the self-built mashrabiya panels‚ chosen for their suitability to the local environment.
- Raul Pantaleo (front row standing, second from right) is an architect and founder member of Studio Tamassociati which he founded in Venice in 1996 together with Massimo Lepore and Simone Sfriso. They specialise in sustainable architecture and are frequently involved in social and humanitarian projects. Tamassociati are particularly known for their work for “Emergency”, an Italian non-governmental organisation providing treatment for civilians in war zones worldwide. Tamassociati has designed health care buildings for Emergency in Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and Nicaragua.Their Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, which opened in 2007, received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013, and their Port Sudan Paediatric Clinic in Darfur, mentioned here, received the 2014 Zumtobel Group Award in the Building category. Tamassociati have also just been named Italian Architects of the Year 2014.
  
  tamassociati.org
  
  The illustrations accompanying this article are by Marta Gerardi and from Tamassociati’s book Destinazione Freetown published 2012 (in Italian only) by Becco Giallo
  
  www.beccogiallo.org
It was in the eighteenth century, with the Age of Enlightenment, that measured precision began to mean using millimetres, and later tenths of a millimetre. Today this is down to microns. It was only with the advent of industrial technology that the obsession with precision began. But in this corner of Sudan, it is the “same, same but different” collective attitude that prevails, and is still the way of working, and a way that we gradually came to accept at our building site.

By accepting that accuracy may really be the privilege of the gods, we ventured into a different dimension of construction. The result was a building that, with no trace of cold formality, expresses the vitality that led to its creation: it is functional and effective while remaining human. In our work with the refugees we experienced the imperfect pleasure of manual work, as opposed to the coldness of automated production. It was not a matter of aesthetics but of a new-found harmony with our own nature. Craft skills and self-building thus became a form of resistance against a modernity that tends towards standardisation but also, we hope, it will be a way of lifting this region out of its poverty. I

About Raul Pantaleo
Walter Segal′s self-build system
In 1963, when architect Walter Segal married for the second time, he and his new wife, Moran Scott, found that with six children between them they needed a newer and larger house. Consequently, they decided to demolish Scott’s existing house in Highgate, North London, and rebuild and expand it.

This left the problem of where to live in the meantime, and so Segal designed a wooden framed structure at the bottom of their garden as a temporary home for him and his family to live in. In order to construct this as quickly and cheaply as possible, rather than digging foundations he used paving slabs to weigh down and locate the structure, adding further rigidity by using a wooden frame which has its own integral geometry. He drew on traditional methods of construction seen from England to Japan.

1.
Previous page: Walter Segal on site in a house being constructed using his self-build system in Forest Hill‚ London, 1970s. (Photo: Philip Sayer) 1. A Segal self-build under construction in Forest Hill. (Photo: Philip Sayer) 2. House in Shooter′s Hill, South East London today. (Photo: Hilly) 3. Self-build frame, Shooter’s Hill, 1970s. (Photo: Gordon Pike)

3.

2.
Houses in Lewisham, London during their completion in the 1970s. (Photo: Pidgeon Digital)
- Walter Segal (1907-1985) was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish Rumanian parents in 1907, and grew up partly in Ticino, Switzerland before emigrating to England in 1936. He set up practice in London in the 1950s, most notably designing a block of flats in Ovington Square built in 1957, but he only gained recognition after 1963, when the development of his simple dry-trade construction methods saw his name become known as one of the progenitors of self-build.
  
  segalselfbuild.co.uk
This frame was then clad with standard off-the-peg sheeting materials and lining elements, meaning the reduction and elimination of most “wet” trades on site, such as brick laying and plastering. This resulted in major time-savings: the whole was built in just two weeks, and cost only 800 GBP.

The radical simplicity of this make-do solution for his own immediate housing needs attracted considerable interest, leading first to commissions and later to Segal’s development of a new system of self-build construction that could be followed by others. With his methods tried and tested, Lewisham Council in South London released several sites for self-builders to construct their own homes following his methods in the mid-1970s. After his death in 1985, the Walter Segal Self Build Trust was set up, and has continued to promote and propagate his method of self-build using dry-trade techniques, which originated at the bottom of a Highgate garden. I (rgw)

About Walter Segal

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5 and 6. Explanatory construction section and on site using the Segal method, Shooter’s Hill. (Photo: Courtesy of Architects′ Journal‚ Special Issue: The Segal Method)
- Freek Lomme is a catalyst in exploring cultural positioning. He operates as curator, writer, editor, lecturer, advisor and moderator for diverse commissioners. He is founding director of exhibition space and publisher Onomatopee.
  
  freeklomme.com
  onomatopee.net
- Confessions
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  First published 1782
  
  Available on Project Gutenberg
Freek Lomme is a founding director of exhibition space and publisher Onomatopee, which is based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. With projects including the exhibition series and book We Can Make it if We Try, he’s long been posing challenging questions about the relationship between the consumer and the designer and the ways in which design can be more “democratic” via self-initiated projects. In his selection of books for this month’s bookmarked section, he’s “highlighting the living nature of the DIY character. Without the Y, the will that kicks things off, nothing’s going to happen in the first place”.

ABOUT Freek Lomme

Let’s start with the autobiography of eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His Confessions, decadent in size, begins with the claim: “My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.” Marking the transition from rational neo-classical culture to sensitive romanticism, one of his self-imposed missions was to promote a new morality for man, including a primal love for one another over socially regulated (constructed) relationships. Basically he comes across as an heroic loser trying to live as well as possible, and an inconsistent asshole at the same time. His life and work deal with truthfulness, and I like this book for that.

Confessions
- Stoner
  John Williams
  Vintage Classics, 1995
  300 pages
  ISBN 978-0-099-56154-5, 2003
  
  vintage-books.co.uk
- Hothouse: The art of survival and the survival of America’s most celebrated publishing house, Farrar Straus & Giroux
  Boris Kachka
  Simon & Schuster, 2013
  448 pages
  ISBN 9781451691894
  
  books.simonandschuster.com
I’m currently reading Stoner, a novel by John Williams, which tells the story of the unremarkable life of William Stoner, a university teacher who comes from an illiterate rural area. I read of his innocent nature, possessing a poetic inclination that he is unable to fulfill due to his time-consuming wife and other day-to-day obligations. He tries to cope with his dreams, but is constantly checked by reality. The book’s main argument seems to be that we should cherish our fruitful accomplishments over missed opportunities. We cannot change our contexts when we’re stuck with received ethical codes.

Stoner
The last book I’m choosing is Hothouse, a book about the business and life of publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The founders of this well-known publishing house chose to counter the culture they were part of, becoming the “Mad Men for the literary world”, in the words of reviewer Junot Diaz. Celebrating a liberal life and utilising the business opportunities of an unfolding liberal culture from within their office, often called a “sexual sewer”, they published some of the most prominent critical writers in twentieth century USA. These guys actually produced a counter-culture and integrated it into the canon, through a balance of creative solidarity and individualist rigor. I

HOthouse
- Mattias Adolfsson is a freelancing compulsive drawer from Sweden who has had his work published in the New York Times Magazine, Tank magazine and Wired. He has also released four books and in 2014 “Sanatorium” was named “most beautiful Swedish book” of the year by Svensk bokkonst.
  
  www.mattiasadolfsson.com
Planet Diy
After Dark

Issue No. 29:
December 18^th2014
“Untitled” from the Sisimiut studies, Greenland, 2002 by Jöel Tettamanti. (Image courtesy of the artist)