A Model Village for the World

Continued from page 1

By Kathryn Beaumont

01/01/2001

Designing a Community: The Workshop

In the two weeks between the earthquake and the start of fall classes at MIT, Wampler, Brady, and Unver scrambled to organize a trip to Turkey for the 11 undergraduate and graduate students who had registered for the workshop. Unver and Brady scouted possible building sites in Turkey, established connections with local governors, and planned visits to tent cities that sheltered thousands of earthquake victims.

For the students, the October 1999 trip was a fact-finding mission. They traveled through the countryside outside of Adapazari not only to look for potential building sites for the village, which would consist of about 50 houses, but also to study the native architecture for design ideas. In addition, with Brady and Unver interpreting, the students met with families-usually over bottomless cups of tea-in the tent camps to ask them what attributes they might like their new homes to have. "It was a very powerful experience," says Bruno Miller '98, SM '00, SM '01. In addition to learning that families valued space for gardening and for community events, the team learned that the people were concerned about the safety of the structures in which they would live. The MIT students' challenge would be to design homes that fit the families' lifestyles but were also stable enough to withstand the shocks of the earthquake-prone geography.

Taking all of this information back to Cambridge, students met twice a week during both the fall and the spring semesters to design the village for a 3.2-hectare site some 10 kilometers from Adapazari. The effort was a collaboration: the architects designed the framework, the urban planners investigated microeconomic opportunities, and the engineers worked on soil stability and energy conservation.

"One of the biggest things we got out of the course was learning to speak to the other disciplines," says current doctoral student Lara Greden, SM '01.

The final design called for 50 units in four-family buildings with light steel frame-bearing walls and site-cast concrete foundations-flexible, earthquake-proof structures. As important to the students as structural stability, however, was honoring the architectural and cultural heritage of Turkey with two-story buildings of local materials like stucco.

"The village looks like it should be there," says Greden.

Respect for a particular culture's traditions is at the core of Wampler's teachings. "When I go to countries, because I'm from MIT, sometimes they expect me to do high-rise, high-tech buildings," Wampler says. "They are surprised when I come and say, You should be doing what you are already doing.'" For Wampler, a sense of community and economic opportunity should dictate the design of the buildings themselves. Not, however, that his students leave out high-tech additions when they're practical. The design of the Turkish microvillage includes a water-filtering system and solar panels for individual houses.