A Place Called Home

Throughout my career, I have worked with designers and architects; individuals who have changed the way we live (shop and play) through their work.  My interest in architecture has taken me to Bilbao, Spain when Frank Gehry’s stunning Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997. Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 at the Montreal World’s Fair was designed with the idea that individuals could live in a dense urban area and still have the quality of life they would find in a house. I often look at his book, For Everyone a Garden (MIT Press, 1974) and think about my trip to Habitat. On a business trip to Rome I toured Dame Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum and visited the Dongdoeman Plaza in Seoul, Korea when it was still under construction. Zaha was the first woman to receive the Pritizer Prize in Architect and she was recognized as one the most dynamic architects working internationally, until her death in March 2016 at the age of sixty-five.

The focus among architects and the design community has been on “form and function.”  Architects became “stars” and buildings celebrities.  Critics, individuals, the academic community wrote and talked about the buildings. A tower that was how high?  Materials that had never been used for the exterior of a building received attention. Shapes that were certainly not square or round began defining structures and capturing headlines.

But the dialogue has changed.  Last week I attended the American Institute of Architects (AIA) conference in Orlando, Florida with Mario Cucinella.  Mario is one of the architects working today and leading the conversation about sustainability.   In his words: “Envisioning sustainable buildings means entering into an intimate relationship with the climate and with the concept of place. …This process seems to me a step closer to the complexity of nature rather than of mechanical artifice.  These (new) buildings will possess a high degree of empathy, a creative empathy.”  Creative Empathy(Skira, 2016)

Attention in the architectural community has shifted to thinking about living in dense urban areas and sustainability.  Many of the areas of dense populations are refugee “camps” or “settlements.”  According to figures released by the United Nations there are 65 million refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people around the world. The places where  these people live do not provide temporary shelter they become homes. Among the largest is the Dadaab complex of refugee camps stationed in south-eastern Kenya.

I have a dear friend in New York who in Tibetan and was born and grew up in a refugee settlement in India.  She has had an extraordinary career, speaks seven languages, has studied in Japan, holds several degrees and has received several grants and awards.  Yet she often talks about doing her homework under the light of an oil lamp, when her family could afford to buy the oil.

The reason architects are interested in refugee camps is because they are dense urban areas.  They have the same problem as cities.  How to manage the public square, sanitation, healthcare, education, transportation … the list goes on.  There is one difference.  People in refugee camps do not hold a passport.  They do not have a country and therefore are without rights in their new community.

Because there has been so much conversation recently about climate change, sustainability and what to do with the millions of refugees it has made me reflect, again, on home.  There is so much we take for granted each day.  A place to live in a beautiful community with lakes and mountains.  People within a community who care and are there for us if something goes terribly wrong. A democracy that allows us a voice and opportunity to speak out for what we believe in.

Memorial Day is just a few weeks away.  If not the official beginning of summer, it is at least a point of entry as we plant our gardens, dust off the lawn chairs and take that first cold plunge into the lake.  How fortunate we are to have a place we call home.