The Harvard Graduate School of Design hosted an Aga Kahn Public Lecture presented by architect Anna Heringer. The image above is a glimpse of her South African home for handicapped children, a delightful precedent study because it explores a unique sense of inclusivity in the design process.

What makes this project so special is that Heringer stepped outside of her comfort zone and thought of all types of users, using local conditions to build. Without rules, building code, it is so easy to go buck-wild with your architecture. Heringer does not. She is smart, respectful, and hones it all in. She doesn’t come onto the site as a foreigner with all of the answers. She doesn’t come onto the site as a missionary with a set of doctrines. She comes onto the site with a set of skills and collaborates with the natives to design a structure that works for them.

Look at the materials. Do you know *how* she engaged the community to rethink the capabilities of their materials? She used her hands to draw and build, her heart and mind to engage her audience. Together they created beautiful and intricate design details, systems to frame the structure before our eyes.

This project is rad, and became even more rad when I heard her speak about it at the GSD.

Organizations like Adaptive Environments shed light on how we can make spaces more efficient for those who may not have every range of motion to their advantage; but architects like Anna Heringer make it possible in conditions we otherwise would consider inacessible — too “third-world” — lacking convenience we don’t realize is a luxury. In this case, luxury is reconsidered, and it’s reconsidered hard core. It is a luxury to dwell in a space that honors who you are, where you come from, and what you aspire to be. Anna Heringer does this. Check out the rest of her work and you will discover that it simply is the way design ought to be.

Designing is a lot about intuition; problem solving; understanding space and human scale. Using the contrast of natural materials to explore tactility and wayfinding are  preemptive design techniques against injury, a consideration of inclusive design. That is what the Engeye Design Team strives to accomplish. We hope to employ local Masaka-region techniques while providing the Ddegeya community an opportunity to engage with structures from a designed point of view.

Let’s experience space in ways only our dreams have dared to do.

Advertisement