ARCH-4980.3 | Carla Leitao, Adjunct Professor

ALTERNATING DISEQUILIBRIUM
Design for States of Prolonged Displacement

SARAH GOLDFARB

While the early built environment derived from the physical need for shelter and security, the modern built environment has been made to respond to not only physical needs, but social and political demands as well.  As technologies advance, so too does the capacity for architecture in terms of materials, potency, and both spatial and social consequences. As an unavoidable force, architecture becomes the voice of a culture, shaping the environment while consciously or subconsciously making claims about issues that have been, and will remain, at the heart of the discipline. Embedded in architecture are questions of the role of permanence versus impermanence. Within this dichotomy, there arise binary subsets of structure and order in opposition to freedom and disorder. Modern architecture cannot escape these qualms, but nowhere are the implications more vigorous, both physically and psychologically, than in the case of the displaced.

The displaced exist in a condition of exile, and as such, they are positioned at the cusp of battles between permanence and temporariness, order and chaos, and structure and freedom. While a delicate, balanced opposition is needed, the current condition is disproportionate; states of exception in which limitation and dependency overshadow tremendous psychosocial needs. The displacement camp must be reevaluated and redesigned in order to obtain alternating disequilibrium; a system which accounts for varying phases and scales of movement and stagnation.  Current structures of humanitarian aid, though competent and facile, are not adequate to meet the demands of the displaced as social, mobile beings. Rigid and restricted, the current mass produced Lightweight Emergency Tent meets UNHCR regulations, but does so without consideration for the displaced as social beings, forced to generate a sense of normalcy within exceptional circumstances. Humanitarian intervention casts the displaced as passive recipients of aid; a role which victimizes them repeatedly and fosters dependence. A catalyst for reformation is introduced in a bottom-up approach; an architectural intervention that harmonizes permanence and transience, order and chaos, and structure and freedom, while deploying the displaced as informational agents and creators of space and informal order, within and beyond the duration of the camp.