Design Corps

SFI8 SPEAKERS

Panel I: activist . practice

            Panelists
            David Perkes and Patricia Broussard, Gulf Coast Community
            Design Studio (Biloxi, MS)
            Liz Ogbu, Public Architecture (San Francisco, CA)
            Carin Smuts, CS Studio Architects (Capetown, South Africa)

            Moderator
            Laura Miller, Associate Professor of Architecture, Harvard Graduate
            School of Design

The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio began after Hurricane Katrina as part of Mississippi State University’s School of Architecture and can be seen as a case study of a practice created to work with experience. The GCCDS made four decisions early on to guide their day-to-day work: (1) to create a workspace within the community to be served, (2) to form long-term partnerships with local organizations, (3) to avoid political and ideological alliances; and (4) most importantly, be useful to the community. The embedded practice of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio is pushing the limits of community design, replacing the occasional community involvement of planning charrettes, exhibits and presentations common to typical community design centers with a continuous collaboration that is both pragmatic and hopeful and puts the expertise of planning and architecture into the day-to-day experience of the community.

David Perkes is an architect and Associate Professor for Mississippi State University School of Architecture. For the past seven years, David has been the director of the Jackson Community Design Center, and since Hurricane Katrina, has been leading the newly establishment Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. As director of the Design Center, David has overseen projects that range from neighborhood planning to feasibility studies to affordable and sustainable housing. Under his leadership the Jackson Community Design Center has assisted many community organizations and has been recognized with numerous national and local awards. David has a Master of Environmental Design degree from Yale School of Architecture, a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Utah, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Utah State University.

Patricia Broussard is a native Mississippian in love with East Biloxi who has lived on her current property for nine years. She has a grown son and daughter. She works in security at a Biloxi casino, but her true love is gardening, and she can tell the story of each plant and tree in her yard. She survived Hurricane Katrina, along with her hardier plants, and has lived in a FEMA trailer for over two years. Throughout the design and construction of her new house, she has formed relationships with the students, designers and numerous volunteers, guiding the design and sharing her knowledge of Biloxi history and gardening in the process.

Public Architecture's public interest design campaigns are multidisciplinary initiatives that utilize design and advocacy to address issues of broad social relevance on which design could profoundly impact. The group’s Day Labor Station design campaign is a responsive solution to the land use, safety, and community issues raised by day laborers gathering in informal sites. Most hiring sites occupy spaces meant for other uses, such as street corners and store parking lots. Far from ideal, their presence in such spaces means that they often lack even the most basic of amenities (shelter, water, toilet facilities, etc.). The Station's innovative structure can be deployed at community-designated locations, creating a specific space for day laborer gatherings. It is a self-sustaining green structure that provides a sheltered space to wait for work as well as a bathroom. The design is based on the way in which the existing day laborer system operates, and allows the structure to operate in various capacities, from employment center to meeting space to classroom.

Public Architecture believes that architecture and design can responsively engage complex social and cultural issues, engender positive social outcomes, and create healthier communities.

Liz Ogbu joined Public Architecture in August 2006. As design campaign manager, she is responsible for design campaign selection, execution, and advocacy. Previously, Liz was a designer at Simon Martin-Vegue Winklestein Morris (SMWM), an architecture and urban design firm in San Francisco. She has been the recipient of several traveling fellowships, including the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Through these grants, she has pursued research projects, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, examining the intersections in the socioeconomic and physical spaces of the informal sector. Liz has also been involved with many community focused projects and organizations here in the U.S., including the launch of the Community Design: Now or Never website and its associated symposium; the Mayors' Institute on City Design; a design outreach program for local youth in Cambridge and Boston; and an affordable housing developer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Liz earned her Bachelor of Arts in architecture from Wellesley College and Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Carin Smuts - CS Studio Architects first projects were initiated in 1982 and the practice was formally established in 1989. The practice has a record of producing innovative, cost effective design solutions. The firm has moved beyond conventional architectural practice to an approach which involves all stakeholders in the creative processes of planning, design and construction. The focus is on an interactive participative process rather than solely on an end – product.

The Studio has completed over 100 significant projects in rural and urban contexts. The practice has a reputation both locally and internationally for producing creative, quality architecture with limited budgets. The projects are of a public nature and include educational, healthcare, arts, culture and heritage and religious buildings, as well as community centres and disabled facilities. Projects involving integrated development planning and low cost housing have also been undertaken and completed successfully, The scope of work also included the restoration of historical monuments. The practice has received recognition for producing quality work in both the architectural and social contexts – providing appropriate, sustainable solutions.

Laura Miller is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches design studio and seminars in design theory

Miller is an architect whose research encompasses the archiving and display of objects, material identification through the socio-cultural meaning of materials, and the spaces of domesticity. Her research examines the visual rhetoric of various display apparatuses that mix architecture, landscape, interior, and some form of human or animal figure in their construction. Hybrids of vastly different scales and materials, these artifacts include religious reliquaries, natural history dioramas, and crime scene replicas. She explores the cultural implications through which the visual rhetoric of such artifacts may be understood, fostering an exchange of knowledge and ideas between a range of disciplines as diverse as forensic science and cultural and material culture studies. She was the American Fellow in Architectural Design at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study in 2003-2004, where she examined a set of interiors associated with the life and work of Frances Glessner Lee, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, and her childhood home, H.H. Richardson's J.J. Glessner house.

Miller is a partner in the architectural office borfax/BLU, located in Cambridge. Her design work has won a number of awards, including a Progressive Architecture Design Award citation. Prior to joining the GSD faculty, she taught at RISD, SCI-Arc, Washington University, Rice University, UCLA, and Iowa State University.