“Design and not just Architecture” serving humanity — From the creative minds of OAC Middle East
Design is multifaceted and limitless. Our general scope of knowledge about design is less ubiquitous and often places constraints on the directions it can lead to. This month, I got the pleasure of chatting with Hebatuallah Hendawy, an Innovation Consultant at Open Architecture Collaborative Middle East. We set up a meeting on Zoom, despite being in different time-zones (Cairo and Toronto), to discuss the impact of ‘Design’ and not just ‘Architecture’, over empowering communities, empowering women and the commonalities found in the process of impact driven communal design not just in Canada or the Middle East but all around the world.
I first encountered OAC when it was Architecture for humanity (AFH) in 2012 when I graduated. I told them that they didn’t have any chapters in the Middle East, so why not we begin to expand the work of AFH to the Middle East. So we launched the Cairo chapter and from there we rebranded Architecture for Humanity to Open Architecture Collaborative. Now we work in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and plan to expand to other countries like Jordan and Tunisia.
The Power of Design
Currently I am managing projects in Egypt and Lebanon. The way we function in the Middle East is that we use the power of design to solve humanitarian challenges. This design can be architecture, urban, fashion, digital or graphic. Whatever design scheme it is, we have a very wide range of activities.
In Egypt I am working on the project called ‘One Urban Thread’. It’s about empowering women from rural areas who tell their stories through embroidery art. This project is focused on different cities that include Siwa, Assiut, Aswan, Dahab, Tor and Nuweba. We are planning to collaborate with another partner for a project in Aswan by the Nile.
In Lebanon, we are working to expand the 100 Slums initiative. It’s an impact-driven travel, we facilitate and mobilize volunteers to travel from Egypt to other projects that we are operating in the world. They shall go to Lebanon to support our partner organization there in order to build an art installation from recycled materials. With another organization in Lebanon, we are partnering to build our own community centre and they target on dealing with Lebanese farmers to produce organic food.
We emphasize on design as a wider spectrum of a way to empower people. We have a focus on the unseen underprivileged communities, on their neighbourhoods that are neglected or usually not seen in the spotlight.
The Architect is not the main Designer, the people are!
My Master’s thesis was in Germany, about integrated urbanism and sustainable design, where I questioned the role of an architect and created the methodology of empowerment, about how to transfer the role of architecture and design from the architect to the community. This process is implemented on our projects, that architecture is a minute part of the whole process where the architect is not the main designer but the people are.
What about the social and political issues coming into play?
We never include any political activities but the social implications of them. The current situation in Lebanon resulted in people suffering from poverty in the under privileged areas. So we consider the political situation as an alarm, to where exactly the need is needed.
It starts from a challenge in general and how we are going to tackle this challenge through a certain community. Once we know the challenge, our process of design includes, scouting the community’s area, fully understanding the situation, making analysis, understanding what’s the root cause of this challenge to solve that root cause and not just what appears on the surface. The created design methodology is not rigid, it’s shaped around the challenge and the people we are dealing with. So along the way, we decide on the tools and methods that we can use that empowers the process and serve the bigger practice. When we move further in the project, we start to get more collaborators and allies who can benefit as a win-win situation. They benefit from something that is related to their own objective and at the same time we benefit from something related to the overall umbrella of the project.
Obstacles and challenges
When you deal with big international organizations, you are faced by a system that takes a lot of democracy to take a decision on the spot. While when you deal with small local organizations, you have problems with localities, they might change their word on something etc. So each path has its own dynamic and challenges and I cannot say that any two projects are the same but there definitely are lessons learned that help us have a more effective process later on. I am planning to do my PhD on how we develop new design processes from one country to another or from one project to another, the general process to learn, and what is the most efficient way to get the work done as fast as possible.
LISTEN! We are not here to make people form a revolution…
The most important thing to do while dealing with communities is to listen to them. Ask a lot of questions. What do they exactly mean, what are they saying? And in order to be able to listen, you cannot have a pre-set judgement or label for these people. You cannot go to a community to disrupt it.
We are not here to make people a revolution, we are here to help people live in the best way possible according to their own tradition, even if it’s not abiding to our own tradition.
For example, some communities are very strict when it comes to women working outside their homes. That’s why we initiated the project ‘One Urban Thread’ because women in these rural areas are not allowed to work outside their homes. So we had to find a project to collaborate with these women, but from a position that respects their tradition. So it’s about completely stepping outside your shoes and standing in their shoes.
Here are some other collaboration projects by OAC Middle East
Barefoot: Whenever we build in a community, we build within natural and vernacular architecture. So we decided to start integrating the natural building materials indoors, so it’s much more of an interior finishing scheme but with natural materials. We do workshops like “Building with Earth”, “Building with Mud”, “Building with Clay”, “Building with Salt” because we have salt lakes in Egypt, and also building with plastic materials or upcycled plastic.
Project concerned with reviving forgotten public spaces: It’s about proposing and implementing various experiences in different forgotten spaces.
To know more about the amazing work done by OAC Middle East, visit the Cairo Chapter’s page on the official Open Architecture Collaborative Website.
