Project AFTERMATH: The emergency architecture

The study focuses on the Pacific Ring of Fire resiliency and dozens prone sites in Asia, Africa, and South America. An emergence of design in the traditional integration of vernacular, collective practices with the timeless architecture after a natural and man-made disaster.

Participation of the community who devastated by disaster can be an architects to design their own temporary habitat. This is the principle of emergency architecture using recycled materials from the affected site and location by typhoon, flood, storm surge, landslide, mudslide, war, pollution, nuclear leakage etc. Revisiting the subject of “Architecture without an architect” as articulated by architect and social historian Bernard Rudofsky in the landmark 1964 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and the principle of the ELEMENTAL design of Alejandro Aravena, 2016 Pritzker Prize Awardee.

Project Aftermath begins by acknowledging that formal architecture addresses a minority of the world’s population, while the vast majority live in informally built dwellings in prone areas. Rudofsky characterized the projects in his 1964 exhibition as “not produced by the specialist but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting under a community experience.” The research project extends this notion to the study of the traditions and methods that enable formal architecture to operate “within the paradigm of projectless environment”, sensitive to the potential “cultural frictions” associated with restricting problematic settlements.

Project Aftermath conveys the idea of everyone can be an architect, scientist, engineers and designer to provide their own habitat in short period of time. The project entails the morphology of habitat start from scratch. An alternative house design made from scrap materials from the destroyed vicinity, it could be lumber, tarpaulins, cloth and producing renewable energy through simple approach of integration of biotechnology. This is the concept of rebuilding the nation and provide active participation of the social architecture to fix their own needs.