Slum

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Slum

Does slum count as architecture? If so, does the architecture training help us to design it? The slum has been built without drawings, diagrams, models. It has been built with the available materials around its location. The structure has been lifted up without calculation. It seems all we learn in architecture school doesn’t help to do this? The way that slum has been built raises the question about architecture as a shelter. Slum is nothing but a shelter. If architecture is considered as a shelter, the architect’s task becomes to build a place to protect people from nature. To protect people from nature is not only an architectural problem. Technologically, there is no difficulty to build shelter. Without architects, people in slum do good jobs always. The difficulty architects face when they try to solve this residing problem is that it is merely such a complicated problem associated with social, economical, political and legal problems. It is a social problem more than an architectural problem, even eventually it will materialized as an architectural form. Architects are just one tiny role in this system. Mostly, every architect’s attempt fails in history. High-rise building is one of them. After World War II, Berlin needs be rebuilt over the debris. Architects find new materials and techniques to build buildings faster to accommodate more people who just lost their homes and families in the war. As the city grows, the land value rises as well. Architects solved this problem by stacking floors higher to use space vertically. However, the recent studies shows that the tower needs much high maintenance and construction cost than low-rise and mid-rise. Architects found a new building type, but didn’t solve the problem. Meanwhile, it causes some other problems like rush hours traffic jam, disconnection between people, and pollution. In this design “game”, architects always play with themselves. Another example is that architects design a stereotype and mass produce to reduce the cost in construction and materials. It is inevitable unsuccessful because it takes more cost on the administration and organization. In this design “game”, architects still don’t win. So if architecture is not just a “shelter”, otherwise there is no need of architects as an independent profession, and architecture is not to solve the social problems, which here refers the slum, what is architecture and what is architect’s task. The answer is simple: architecture doesn’t solve social problem. It is more the representation of the human being’s power. As in , I just read recently: “We build for emotional and psychological purpose, as well for ideological and practical reason. The language of architecture is used to project power.”