gestaltung der wände mit farbe
every weekend for as longas i can remember, my father would get up on a saturday, put on a worn sweatshirt and he'd scrape away at the squeaky old wheelof a house that we lived in. i wouldn't even call it restoration; it was a ritual, catharsis. he would spend all yearscraping paint with this old heat gun and a spackle knife,
and then he would repaintwhere he scraped, only to begin again the following year. scraping and re-scraping,painting and repainting: the work of an old houseis never meant to be done. the day my father turned 52,i got a phone call. my mother was on the line to tell me that doctors had founda lump in his stomach -- terminal cancer, she told me, and he had been givenonly three weeks to live.
i immediately moved hometo poughkeepsie, new york, to sit with my father on death watch, not knowing what the next dayswould bring us. to keep myself distracted, i rolled up my sleeves, and i went about finishingwhat he could now no longer complete -- the restoration of our old home. when that looming three-week deadline came and then went,
he was still alive. and at three months, he joined me. we gutted and repainted the interior. at six months, the old windowswere refinished, and at 18 months, the rotted porch was finally replaced. and there was my father, standing with me outside,admiring a day's work,
hair on his head, fully in remission, when he turned to me and he said, "you know, michael, this house saved my life." so the following year, i decidedto go to architecture school. (laughter) but there, i learnedsomething different about buildings. recognition seemed to come to those who prioritizednovel and sculptural forms,
like ribbons, or ... pickles? and i think thisis supposed to be a snail. something about this bothered me. why was it that the best architects,the greatest architecture -- all beautiful and visionaryand innovative -- is also so rare, and seems to serve so very few? and more to the point:
with all of this creative talent,what more could we do? just as i was about to startmy final exams, i decided to take a breakfrom an all-nighter and go to a lecture by dr. paul farmer, a leading health activistfor the global poor. i was surprised to hear a doctortalking about architecture. buildings are makingpeople sicker, he said, and for the poorest in the world, this is causing epidemic-level problems.
in this hospital in south africa, patients that came inwith, say, a broken leg, to wait in this unventilated hallway, walked out with a multidrug-resistantstrand of tuberculosis. simple designs for infection controlhad not been thought about, and people had died because of it. "where are the architects?" paul said. if hospitals are making people sicker, where are the architects and designers
to help us build and designhospitals that allow us to heal? that following summer, i was in the back of a land roverwith a few classmates, bumping over the mountainoushillside of rwanda. for the next year, i'd be living in butaroin this old guesthouse, which was a jail after the genocide. i was there to design and builda new type of hospital with dr. farmer and his team. if hallways are making patients sicker,
what if we could design a hospitalthat flips the hallways on the outside, and makes people walk in the exterior? if mechanical systems rarely work, what if we could design a hospitalthat could breathe through natural ventilation, and meanwhile reduceits environmental footprint? and what about the patients' experience? evidence showsthat a simple view of nature can radically improve health outcomes,
so why couldn't we design a hospital where every patienthad a window with a view? simple, site-specific designscan make a hospital that heals. designing it is one thing; getting it built, we learned,is quite another. we worked with bruce nizeye, a brilliant engineer, and he thought aboutconstruction differently than i had been taught in school.
when we had to excavatethis enormous hilltop and a bulldozer was expensiveand hard to get to site, bruce suggested doing it by hand, using a method in rwanda called "ubudehe," which means "community worksfor the community." hundreds of people camewith shovels and hoes, and we excavated that hill in half the time and halfthe cost of that bulldozer. instead of importing furniture,bruce started a guild,
and he brought inmaster carpenters to train others in how to make furniture by hand. and on this job site, 15 years after the rwandan genocide, bruce insisted that we bring onlabor from all backgrounds, and that half of them be women. bruce was usingthe process of building to heal, not just for those who were sick, but for the entire community as a whole.
we call this the locally fabricatedway of building, or "lo-fab," and it has four pillars: hire locally, source regionally, train where you can and most importantly, think about every design decisionas an opportunity to invest in the dignityof the places where you serve. think of it like the local food movement,
but for architecture. and we're convincedthat this way of building can be replicated across the world, and change the way we talk aboutand evaluate architecture. using the lo-fab way of building, even aesthetic decisionscan be designed to impact people's lives. in butaro, we chose to usea local volcanic stone found in abundance within the area, but often considereda nuisance by farmers,
and piled on the side of the road. we worked with these masonsto cut these stones and form them into the wallsof the hospital. and when they began on this corner and wrapped around the entire hospital, they were so good at puttingthese stones together, they asked us if they could take downthe original wall and rebuild it. and you see what is possible. it's beautiful.
and the beauty, to me, comes from the fact that i knowthat hands cut these stones, and they formed them into this thick wall, made only in this placewith rocks from this soil. when you go outside todayand you look at your built world, ask not only: "what is the environmental footprint?" --an important question -- but what if we also asked, "what is the human handprintof those who made it?"
we started a new practicebased around these questions, and we tested it around the world. like in haiti, where we asked if a new hospitalcould help end the epidemic of cholera. in this 100-bed hospital, we designed a simple strategy to clean contaminated medical wastebefore it enters the water table, and our partners at les centres gheskio are already saving lives because of it.
or malawi: we asked if a birthing centercould radically reduce maternal and infant mortality. malawi has one of the highest ratesof maternal and infant death in the world. using a simple strategyto be replicated nationally, we designed a birthing center that would attract womenand their attendants to come to the hospital earlierand therefore have safer births.
or in the congo, where we asked if an educational centercould also be used to protect endangered wildlife. poaching for ivory and bushmeat is leading to global epidemic,disease transfer and war. in one of the hardest-to-reachplaces in the world, we used the mud and the dirtand the wood around us to construct a center that would show us ways to protectand conserve our rich biodiversity.
even here in the us, we were asked to rethink the largest university for the deafand hard of hearing in the world. the deaf community, through sign language, shows us the powerof visual communication. we designed a campusthat would awaken the ways in which we as humans all communicate, both verbally and nonverbally. and even in poughkeepsie, my hometown,
we thought about oldindustrial infrastructure. we wondered: could we use arts and cultureand design to revitalize this city and other rust belt citiesacross our nation, and turn them into centersfor innovation and growth? in each of these projects,we asked a simple question: what more can architecture do? and by asking that question, we were forced to considerhow we could create jobs,
how we could source regionally and how we could investin the dignity of the communities in which we serve. i have learned that architecture can bea transformative engine for change. about a year ago, i read an article about a tireless and intrepidcivil rights leader named bryan stevenson. (applause)
and bryan had a bold architectural vision. he and his team had been documenting the over 4,000 lynchingsof african-americans that have happened in the american south. and they had a plan to mark every countywhere these lynchings occurred, and build a national memorialto the victims of lynching in montgomery, alabama. countries like germany and south africa and, of course, rwanda,
have found it necessary to build memorials to reflect on the atrocitiesof their past, in order to heal their national psyche. we have yet to do thisin the united states. so i sent a cold emailto info@equaljusticeintiative.org: "dear bryan," it said, "i think your building project is maybe the most importantproject we could do in america and could change the waywe think about racial injustice.
by any chance, do you know who will design it?" surprisingly, shockingly, bryan got right back to me, and invited me down to meetwith his team and talk to them. needless to say,i canceled all my meetings and i jumped on a planeto montgomery, alabama. when i got there, bryan and his team picked me up,and we walked around the city.
and they took the time to point out the many markers that havebeen placed all over the city to the history of the confederacy, and the very few that markthe history of slavery. and then he walked me to a hill. it overlooked the whole city. he pointed out the riverand the train tracks where the largest domesticslave-trading port in america had once prospered.
and then to the capitol rotunda, where george wallacehad stood on its steps and proclaimed, "segregation forever." and then to the very hill below us. he said, "here we will builda new memorial that will change the identityof this city and of this nation." our two teams have workedtogether over the last year to design this memorial. the memorial will take us on a journey
through a classical,almost familiar building type, like the parthenonor the colonnade at the vatican. but as we enter, the ground drops below usand our perception shifts, where we realize that these columnsevoke the lynchings, which happened in the public square. and as we continue, we begin to understand the vast number of those who have yet to be put to rest.
their names will be engravedon the markers that hang above us. and just outside will be a fieldof identical columns. but these are temporary columns,waiting in purgatory, to be placed in the very countieswhere these lynchings occurred. over the next few years, this site will bear witness, as each of these markers is claimed and visibly placed in those counties. our nation will begin to healfrom over a century of silence.
when we think abouthow it should be built, we were reminded of ubudehe, the building processwe learned about in rwanda. we wondered if we could fillthose very columns with the soil from the sitesof where these killings occurred. brian and his team have beguncollecting that soil and preserving it in individual jars with family members, communityleaders and descendants. the act of collecting soil itself
has lead to a type of spiritual healing. it's an act of restorative justice. as one eji team member noted in the collection of the soilfrom where will mcbride was lynched, "if will mcbride left one drop of sweat, one drop of blood, one hair follicle -- i pray that i dug it up, and that his whole bodywould be at peace."
we plan to break groundon this memorial later this year, and it will be a place to finally speakof the unspeakable acts that have scarred this nation. when my father told methat day that this house -- our house -- had saved his life, what i didn't know was that he was referringto a much deeper relationship between architecture and ourselves.
buildings are not simplyexpressive sculptures. they make visible our personaland our collective aspirations as a society. great architecture can give us hope. great architecture can heal. thank you very much.