The American architect discusses rebuilding Haiti and designing houses for the real world.
Eric Cesal, photo Brendan O'Hagan
Why is it that, in times of economic crisis, architects are the first to be given the white envelope? Why did unemployment among architects in the United Kingdom increase760% between 2008 and 2009? Why, when times are tight, does architecture always become one of the most redundant professions in the Western world?
These are the questions explored in Down Detour Rd: An Architect in Search of Practice, by American architect Eric Cesal. The book, part manifesto, part memoir, was motivated by personal circumstances: Cesal had a lot of time on his hands. He had graduated with a Masters in Architecture, a Masters in Construction, and a Masters of Business Administration in 2008, just in time for the recession. All the qualifications in the world and he couldn’t get a job.
And he wasn’t alone. “We had 10% unemployment in general, but anywhere from 30 to 50% in architecture,” he says. “It was just catastrophic. Everybody I knew, regardless of what style of architecture they were practising, was in trouble. So for me that prompted an investigation of what it meant to be an architect. The fact that architects should be affected more than any other profession speaks to a problem that is in need of remedying.”
Cesal doesn’t put it down to the visually illiterate masses failing to understand the virtues of good design, as some architects might. Instead, he suggests the profession has, over the past couple of decades, failed to make its purpose clear, not been relevant enough and failed to take on board the big problems. “As certain issues – of globalisation, of ecological calamity, of climate change – gained strength and became part of the lexicon, there was still a large section of the architectural discourse that didn’t want to deal with this. We sort of said, ‘We don’t want to know anything about that, it doesn’t pertain to us’, and the world turned around and said, ‘Well, you don’t pertain to us, either.’”
Rightly or wrongly, architects are still often perceived as stuck in a rarefied groove; as those who design houses for rich people. “Of course there are plenty of exceptions, and lots of architects are doing amazing things. But on the whole, we’re not perceived as engaged, relevant problem solvers.”
In was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a couple of years before he graduated, that Cesal hitched a ride to Biloxi, Mississippi, hoping to be of some use. It was there he met members of the organisation Architecture for Humanity.
“A post-disaster situation puts you in touch with things that, as an architect, you have always worked with, but it helps you understand them on a different level. Basic ideas of shelter, and what that means to a society and civilisation. You know that saying, ‘You don’t appreciate something until it’s gone’? When you see an entire city stripped of that, you start to understand the implications of what it was. In the case of a shelter, a home, that it’s a sense of security. It’s the largest capital investment you make, the collateral on which you send your kids to college, a form of healthcare. To see that situation changed my architecture.”
He volunteered for Architecture for Humanity in Biloxi that year and in New Orleans the following year. He is now stationed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as the regional programme manager for the Architecture for Humanity Haiti Rebuilding Center. He has found, in other words, his kind of architectural practice. “It’s being innovative, it’s serving, it’s making a defence for people who need help. It’s making a defence of the term architect.”
Cesal was in New Zealand for the annual New Zealand Institute of Architects conference earlier this year and his argument must have made an impact: this month six architecture students and a lecturer from the Unitec Institute of Technology have gone to assist Architecture for Humanity in Haiti for four weeks. The phrase they use is “learning architecture through the soles of our feet”.
After all, says head of architecture, Tony van Raat, architecture is a “service profession” that is pertinent in a range of contexts: working with wealthy patrons to build monumental buildings and with ordinary people in stable environments, but also in situations where people are in dire need of the most basic fundamentals of life.
“We’re interested in giving our students the opportunities to learn about disaster-relief intervention. The Christchurch earthquake has given a certain poignancy to that. People say, ‘Why aren’t you sending them to Christchurch?’ But we’re sending students to learn, so that whenever a disaster happens, either within New Zealand or in any other part of the world, New Zealand can contribute expertise. That’s a highly motivating, worthy, noble thing to do.”
For an architect looking to help solve the big problems, there is no place like Haiti. Its main problem, as in most large-scale disasters, is poverty – hundreds of thousands of poor people lived in buildings that weren’t built to withstand earthquakes. The solution lies in making Haiti a richer place, and Cesal doesn’t mean that metaphorically.
He refers to the adage “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a year.” Rebuilding Haiti is as much about moving Haitians into the middle class as an exercise in reconstruction, he says, helping the locals benefit from financial aid earmarked to rebuild Port-au-Prince, rather than handing it over to foreign contractors, and using architecture as the conduit.
Practically speaking, this means teaching contractors how to read architectural documents, training local architects in modern software, teaching construction businesses how to put in a competitive bid and training young Haitian engineers in seismic construction. It has meant going down to a building site and, using a paper cup and a mixing stick, showing people what a good concrete mix looks like.
“One of the things that has proven difficult in Haiti is that there is a building tradition there, but it’s just not very good. So you find foremen and labourers who have been building the wrong way for 40 years.” It’s imperative, he says, that those involved in Architecture for Humanity work alongside the communities they are trying to help, to get the community to guide their design. “You’re there to be an instrument of their ambitions, not to tell them what they want.”
Which is one of the great satisfactions. “It’s a very humbling thing to walk into a community meeting in Haiti, and draw out of them what their real ambitions are, what their needs are. And as hard as it is, you have to do it, because that’s the only way you get something that is sustainable, that the community embraces and takes care of.
“It’s not the Frank Lloyd Wright hero architect waving a watercolour brush over a piece of paper and this brilliant thing comes out. What comes out is much more communal, much more collective. That’s part of the beauty of it.”
DOWN DETOUR RD: AN ARCHITECT IN SEARCH OF PRACTICE, by Eric J Cesal (MIT Press, $30.95).