bibliostructures

fLY…, Photograph by JoanLovesPaper at Flickr

Many of my inspirations are from architecture and increasingly I’m inspired by the work of architects responding to emergency housing needs with innovative temporary structures. I’ve already made a small (to be expanded) reference to Shigeru Ban’s refugee housing programmes. I also admire the work, and ingenuity, of the Australian architect Sean Godsell.

There are several characters in William Gibson’s novels that he calls “gomi non sensei”, masters of junk. These are people who embody the wisdom of a generation either fading away or being violently submerged in the wake of a transformative new technology. These characters are able to take simple, outdated (outmoded, out-of-format) equipment and materials and fashion them into something that makes a tool that uniquely responds to a community need in a time of disaster. There’s something of the gomi non sensei in Shigeru Ban’s understanding that refugees would sell metal poles that were holding up their tents, and then cut trees down to provide structural support, and instead fashioning paper poles to hold up the tents. Sean Godsell is internationally famous (infamous in Australia) for a shipping container converted into housing, and a proposal for turning bus shelters, at night, into temporary or emergency housing. What’s most impressive about these projects is the dignity embodied in them, whether it’s in the ritual of erecting the structures that Shigeru Ban hopes the residents will be involved in, or Sean Godsell’s bus shelter houses having provision for artworks on the walls, a personal humanising, settling touch.

In the International Herald Tribune there’s an article about Architecture for Humanity, which responds to crises around the world, beginning a web based information sharing programme.

Architecture for Humanity has … [launched] … the Open Architecture Network, which went live last Thursday as a Web site devoted to humanitarian design. As well as providing case studies of existing projects — like emergency housing and irrigation programs — the site helps designers and architects develop new work by enabling their peers to critique it online. “If everyone is reinventing the tent again and again, you end up with first generation design solutions,” said Sinclair. “By sharing information, you create a genealogy of innovation, with three or four generations of designs spun off from the original.”

Architecture for Humanity talked of its admiration for an Indian organisation called Sristi

The role model of online collaboration in the developing world is India’s Honey Bee Network. It was started in 1996 by Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Honey Bee pools information on the ingenious devices and systems — from farming tools, to construction techniques — dreamed up by self- taught inventors, mostly agricultural workers. Typically the ideas are cheap, simple and effective, but before Honey Bee posted them on its Web site at www.sristi.org/honeybee, no one knew of them except the inventors and their immediate circle. Over 10,000 inventions are now posted on the site, enabling thousands of people in India and other countries to benefit from them. Honey Bee has also helped some inventors to commercialize their ideas by putting them in contact with investors and manufacturers. “The impact has been enormous,” said Gupta. “Honey Bee is based and deeply embedded in Indian culture and institutions, but the Internet has given us enormous access to ideas, individuals, institutions and ideologies all over the world.” Honey Bee is now in discussions to begin similar initiatives in China and Brazil.

International Herald Tribune

The Honeybee database is a “creative commons” project in intent, people drawing from the database and putting back in recommendations, suggestions and improvements. I searched for paper projects and was mesmerised by a Vietnamese project to combat the theft of seeds by red birds by the making of white paper birds that are mounted on sticks and frighten the red birds.

In Japan the white paper bird has a religious signficance. In origami the white paper crane represents longevity.

The first book written about origami was, “Senbazuro Orikata” (The Way to Fold a Thousand Cranes) which was published in 1797. The paper crane is perhaps the most popular and famous of all origami objects. Legend has it that 1,000 folded cranes will bring health and good fortune and it is customary to make 1,000 paper cranes for people who are ill with the hopes that they will recover. Each year millions of paper cranes are sent by people from all over the world to the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima as a symbol of peace and in memory of those who died as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on the city in 1945.

Japan corner

Nitin Sawhney’s album Beyond Skin is a million white paper cranes. It begins with a fragment of audio from India’s prime minister announcing the successful test of a nuclear bomb and ends with a fragment of audio from the head of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, at the first successful test of an atomic bomb: Krishna saying ”now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” The Bhagavad Gita is a fragment of the Mahabarata (transcribed by the elephant headed Ganesh, patron saint of writers among many other things.) Nitin Sawhney is writing music for a theatrical staging of the Mahabarata at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

If we want to understand the spiritual meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, we had better forget everything concerning the great battle of the Mahabarata or the story of Krishna and Arjuna in the vast epic. A spiritual reader of the Gita will find it in the great spiritual struggle of a human soul. The war imagery is even used by Krishna in the poem when at the end of Chapter 3 he says: ‘Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul’; and again at the end of Chapter 4: ‘Kill therefore with the sword of the wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in thy heart.’ How could the treachery, robbery, and butchery of war be reconciled with the spiritual vision and love of the Bhagavad Gita? How could we reconcile it with the spirit of the Gita, and of all true spiritual seers, as expressed in those words of Krishna? ‘And when a man sees that the God in himself is the same God in all that is, he hurts not himself by hurting others: then he goes indeed to the highest path’.

Juan Mascaro from the introduction to his 1962 translation of The Bhagavad Gita