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| Useful design: UW architecture students won a 2007 contest with this slide-out bench they installed in a New Orleans park. Last year’s winners are now getting rival architects to build temporary structures for Seattle’s homeless. Photo courtesy TiLT |
Adrienne Wicks and Travis Anderson
were roving through New Orleans neighborhoods last year with 46 hours to find a place, make a plan, and build a structure.
“We didn’t have a lot of time to flounder around,” recalls Anderson.
Next to a park in a residential area, they knocked on someone’s front door. The neighbor told them about the patch of open space, where basketball and baseball were played but chairs were on a BYO basis. For something to sit on, kids would tip over trash cans, spilling their contents, and roll them courtside.
Wicks and Anderson recognized an opportunity.
The result was a pull-out bench between
the playing fields, a place where children and adults could rest and watch. It won the contest. Now, Wicks, Anderson, and their design team TiLT are hosting this year’s challenge. The object: build mobile, temporary, usable structures for Seattle’s Tent City 3 and Homeless Women in Black.
UW professor Steve Badanes, a judge for the contest, says the team contacted Tent City leaders in recent months to see how Seattle’s homeless could be served by architects. “They expressed needs for different kinds of projects: trash containers, portable shelving,” says Badanes. “Women in Black mentioned the memorial” dedicated to homeless people who have died on the streets — an idea that gained an endorsement from City Council but not a home from the Parks Department.
On Thurs., March 27, at least seven teams of designers, many of them from UW’s School of Architecture, will be matched with their clients. The organizers
of Tent City, SHARE/WHEEL, are on board, as is Women in Black. The architects will solicit ideas, find materials, and build the structures — which may take the form of benches, trash receptacles, or portable memorials— by Sun., March 30, when they’ll go on display at Tent City in Ballard.
“The idea,” says Badanes, “was that the homeless population of Seattle is not particularly well served by the traditional architectural profession and could need our services.”
Wicks and Anderson are encouraging teams to use salvaged or secondhand materials. They’re also working with the city’s aggressive targeting of urban
camping in mind, says Badanes. “Recently there’s been a whole series of sweeps. The city has turned a lot uglier in dealing with [encampments],” he says, “I think this is an appropriate issue for us.”
Noting that architects tend to work “at the top of the food chain,” designing homes for the wealthy, Badanes says pro bono or community-
motivated architecture has a strong history and may be making a comeback. Thirteen Seattle firms have pledged 1 percent of their time to pro bono work, according to Public Architecture, a campaign for public-interest
design consulting begun in 2005. Nationwide, 300 firms had made the pledge, according to the group’s web site, theonepercent.org.
Anderson did political organizing before going back to school. “There are parallels that run through” the work he did then and the contest he’s organizing. “I’ve been committed
to doing outreach on a grassroots
level… I really enjoy working with groups and hearing different ideas that come out.”
For Wicks, the New Orleans trip and this year’s event are welcome reprieves from the drafting board.
“I find it really energizing to get out of the studio, get away from the paper,” she says. |
