Alfredo Brillembourg: 'Empower Shack As Project' (Mar 31)

(photo by Jan Ras)

EMPOWER SCHACK
While South Africa is usually seen as a source of stability and prosperity in its region, approximately 7.5 million people live in informal settlements and the country faces an overall housing shortage of 2.5 million units. Arising from this context, Empower Shack is an interdisciplinary development project directed by U-TT and the local NGO Ikhayalami Development Services, in collaboration with the BT-Section community and associated local and international partners. 

The ongoing pilot phase is focused on a cluster of 68 houses within the BT-Section of Khayelitsha. Through innovative design and organizational models, the project aims to develop a comprehensive and sustainable informal settlement upgrading strategy centered on four core components: a two-story housing prototype, participatory spatial planning, ecological landscape management, and integrated livelihoods programming. 

Employing the socio-spatial “Blocking Out” process alongside new digital visualization tools and micro-financing, Empower Shack has created an interface between residents, professionals, and the government. Together, with its partners, U-TT is developing an approach that responds to contemporary social, ecological, and market dynamics, and which will provide incentives for the state to extend tenureship rights. This would create a legally durable foundation for future incremental upgrading, as well as a system that can dovetail with established policy mechanisms. 

The physical upgrading of BT-Section will be complete by the end of 2017, at which point a year-long evaluation project will monitor the outcome and plan for future upgrades in the region. In the meantime, the City of Cape Town is supporting the program as a pilot project for potential replication.

ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG
was born in New York. He received his Bachelor of Art and Architecture in 1984 and his Master of Science in Architectural Design in 1986 from Columbia University. Alfredo Brillembourg is a founding partner of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) , an interdisciplinary design practice dedicated to high-level research and design on a variety of subjects, concerned with contemporary architecture and urbanism. The philosophy of U-TT is to deliver innovative yet practical solutions through the combined skills of architects, civil engineers, environmental planners, landscape architects, and communication specialists.

In 1998, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner founded U-TT in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2007, Brillembourg and Klumpner have taught at Columbia University, where they founded the Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory (S.L.U.M. Lab), and since July 2010, they hold the chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the ETH in Zurich . Their work concerns both theoretical and practical applications within architecture and urban planning. Working in global contexts by creating bridges between first world industry and third world, informal urban areas, they focus on the education and development of a new generation of professionals, who will transform cities in the 21st century. They have been awarded the 2010 Ralph Erskine Award , the 2011 Holcim Gold Award for Latin America, the 2012 Holcim Global Silver Award for innovative contributions to ecological and social design practices, and the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture Golden Lion .

...AS PROJECT LECTURE SERIES
This event is the last installment of the lecture series ...as project  at the KTH School of Architecture, preceded by talks by Jing Liu of SO-IL, Bryony Roberts, Jonas Dahlberg, Alastair Parvin of WikiHouse and Jorge-Otero-Pailos. For the series, the speakers are invited to present one specific project in great depth and detail. The aim of the series is twofold. Firstly, rather than rushing through a practice's complete ouevre, the ambition is to provide an apportunity for a closer look at, and a deeper understanding of, a single work of architecture. Secondly, the series as a whole is an attempt at instigating a wider conversation on the notion of "the project" in architecture. Throughout the series, the ambition is to open inquiries into design and construction processes, contextual settings, singularity vs continuity of practice, client relations, post-occupancy, and so forth.

Hosted in collaboration with the 
You can also find this event on the KTH-A facebook page .