WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 4 , 2014 €16, $20, £13, ₹1100
Extreme Environments
The Lofoten Islands in northern Norway have been an important place for cod fisheries for over 1,000 years. During the winter the cod migrate south from the Barents Sea and gather in Lofoten to spawn. The fish are caught, split and hung outdoors to dry on a gigantic wooden rack called a hjell. Three months later, when the wind and sun have removed 80% of their water, the cod have become stockfish, a lightweight, non-perishable commodity destined
for the south of Europe where dried cod has been an important element of the regional cuisine since the days when Catholicism predominated and people often abstained from meat. Towards the end of April, an area of 400,000 m² (4,300,000 sq. ft) of Lofoten is covered in stockfish, a major Norwegian export. Photo: George F. Mobley/National Geographic/Getty Images). Inside front cover photo: Valeri Belov
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There are fertile lands in warm climates that have just enough sunshine and rainfall to create ideal conditions for human life. But as populations grow and competition for resources increases, communities press outward into less-ideal areas, braving extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and darkness, striking out into the farthest, most isolated places they can reach. Humans are essentially warm-climate animals with bodies ill-equipped to deal with cold, darkness, severe weather or lack of oxygen. Capable of only limited physical adaptation, they must instead devise clothing, shelter and tools that allow them to survive in hostile climates. By combining their inherent creativity and accumulated knowledge, they can remain essentially tropical animals as they colonise colder regions. WTW went to Tromsø, Norway to study how people adapt to the Arctic climate. In collaboration with NODA (the North Norwegian Design and Architectural Centre) we organised our first on-location content scouting, speaking to locals about the unique ways they have learned to live and work in the far north. There are, of course, many other kinds of extreme environments, and so we expanded our research to include war zones, deserts, non-residential buildings and even outer space, looking for the innovations that make life possible even in those places. But as fascinating as it was to explore tools and architectural particularities, ultimately the real reward was in the human stories we encountered, stories of how overcoming hardship creates tight communities and awakens the potential in each of us. — Peter BiĞak
Works That Work, Issue 4, Autumn 2014 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Artefacts section: Anne Miltenburg Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Ando Den Haag Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava and Neutral from Typotheque Special thanks to Michele Renee Widerøe Printed on certified, environ mentally friendly papers: Heaven 42 135 g/m2, MultiDesign Original 100 g/m2, Magno Star 115 g/m2 and Rives Tradition 250 g/m2 (cover). Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it. Contributors this issue: Kurt Alvarez, photographer, Manila; Iwan Baan, photogra pher, Amsterdam; Per Kristian Bergmo, photographer, Tromsø; Bruno van der Elshout, photo grapher, Den Haag; Phillip Gangan, writer, Leiden; Jonah Goodman, writer, Berlin; Pete Guest, journalist, London; Elina Halttunen, biologist, Tromsø; Ramón Iriarte, journalist, New York; Svein Kvalvik, inventor, Lofoten; Rahul Mehrotra, architect, Cambridge; James Mollison, photographer, Venice; Joar Nango, artist, Tromsø; Alice Polenghi, graphic designer, Tromsø; Anne Quito, writer, New York; Graham van de Ruit, designer, Harare; Kristina Schröder, photographer, Tromsø; Silje Figenschou Thoresen, artist, Kirkenes; Harsha Vadlamani, photographer, Hyderabad; Felipe Vera, architect, Cambridge.
Patronage: Help us make Works That Work. Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, a small magazine-related present, your name printed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine. worksthatwork.com/patrons
In this issue:
Artefacts
by Anne Miltenburg 4
An Ancient Design in a Modern Age
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by Per Kristian Bergmo
The following people helped to make Issue 4: Jo De Baerdemaeker Brian Scott/Boon Jason Dilworth Konrad Glogowski Geir Goosen Wooseok Jang Frith Kerr, Studio Frith Benjamin Listwon Jay Rutherford Martin Tiefenthaler Mark Simonson Clodagh Twomey Typefounding Typeheaven Dana Wooley Nicholas Yankosky
Sámi Self-sufficiency
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by Joar Nango & Silje Figenschou Thoresen
This issue was made with the support of NODA (the North Norwegian Design and Architectural Centre), The Tromsø Academy of Art, Grafill, and Innovation Norway. Made and printed in the Netherlands Copyright © Typotheque 2014 All rights reserved. If you’d like to reproduce anything from this magazine, please ask first. Now you might be asking, ‘What is Typotheque, and why does it hold the copyright to this magazine?’ You see, dear reader, WTW is not a company, it’s a project, and Typotheque is the company that pays its bills. And Typotheque is no multinational corporation, but a company of two, a husband and wife, (a loving wife who tolerates the expensive hobbies of her husband). This printed magazine is sold subject to the condition that it should be lent to as many people as possible without the publisher’s prior consent, this condition to be applied also to subsequent readers.
Tower of David: Urban Survival Creativity Text by Ramón Iriarte, photography by Iwan Baan and Ramón Iriarte
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A Litre at a Time
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Text by Phillip Gangan, photography by Kurt Alvarez
Branding the World’s Newest Country 58 by Anne Quito
Constructing the World’s Biggest 66 (Disassemblable) City by Rahul Mehrotra and Felipe Vera
Bringing Kids to School
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Photography by Bruno van der Elshout, Alice Polenghi and Kristina Schröder, Graham van de Ruit, Harsha Vadlamani; text by Peter Biľak
Living Underground
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Photography by Markus Gann, Nicholas Jones, Daniele Mattioli and Torsten Blackwood; text by Peter Biľak
Improvised Design in the Siege of Sarajevo
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by Jonah Goodman
From Earth To Mars by Pete Guest
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Artefacts
ICEBOUND the North Pole
Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people north of the Arctic Circle in order to solve problems big and small.
Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1893– 1930) had a lifetime of experience testing new survival methods and equipment in the Arctic climate. In an attempt to reach the North Pole, his ship Fram rode the ice currents for two years, sometimes only moving 1.6 km (1 mi) per day. Naval architect Colin Archer insulated the boat to perfection, using methods closely resembling passive house architecture as it is applied today. The sides of the ship consisted of multiple layers of wooden planks, the spaces between its ribs being filled with a mixture of coal-tar, pitch and sawdust. The rooms inside were additionally insulated, their wood panelling concealing a watertight layer of linoleum backed with layers of felt, pine panels, cork and tarred felt. This proved so effective in keeping them all warm that he confided to his diary (published as Farthest North): ‘I am thinking of having the stove removed altogether; it is only in the way.’
Collected by Anne Miltenburg
Image from Nansen, Fridtjof: Farthest North, Vol II, Constable & Co, London 1897
Artefacts
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GONE FISHING Lofoten Islands, Norway
ALL FOR ONE Tromsø, Norway
In order to attract particular species of fish across a large area more effectively, Svein Kvalvik developed a set of scent baits. Working with research institutes and industrial partners, he researched the smells and tastes that various fish prefer, and developed attractants made of raw marine materials that tickle their taste buds. One formula attracts cod, another halibut, and a third one trout, salmon and char, all from as far away as 700 m (0.4 mi). Kvalvik is currently finalising development of the product for the commercial fishing market. In the meantime, amateur fishermen can buy it in the form of a cream in a tube and apply it to their rubber fishing lures. Scent baits not only eliminate the need to carry fish as bait for other fish, but they also limit the unwanted by-catch of species the fishermen were not looking for in the first place. Happy fishing.
After a mastectomy the default response of the healthcare system today is to push for reconstructive surgery. But what if you are a woman who is not willing to go through the painful process of reconstruction? What if you think having one breast is not a problem at all? Norwegian marine biologist Elina Halttunen was such a woman, but her principles were put to the test whenever she headed to the beach for a swim. Opting out of uncomfortable prosthetics and padded bikinis, she teamed up with artists to develop the crowdfunded Monokini 2.0, a bikini that proudly shows off its wearer.
Photo courtesy of Svein Kvalvik.
Photo: Pinja Valja, courtesy of Nutty Tarts
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REINDEER IN THE DARK Finland
SOLAR SPELL Rjukan, Norway
To the peril of both animals and drivers, daily life in cold climates includes the risk of cars and reindeer colliding. Long, lonely roads winding through forests and mountainous terrain make it hard for even the most alert driver to spot the reindeer in time. In 2013 alone, 3,665 reindeer were killed by cars. The Finnish Reindeer Herder’s Association has come up with a clever plan to reduce the death toll by applying a reflective spray to the animals’ antlers, thus making the reindeer easily visible to drivers in the long, dark, winter nights. If the test, to be run this February on 20 reindeer, is successful, the method will be applied to the rest of the Finnish reindeer population, a staggering 200,000 animals.
For six months out of every year, the sun disappears behind the mountains of Rjukan, located in a 450 m (1,500 ft)-deep valley in central Norway. When industrialist Sam Eyde founded the town in 1913 to house his factory workers and their families, he realised that the absence of light was a problem. He devised a plan to place mirrors on top of the hill that looms over the town, but had to abandon the plan for lack of adequate technology. Since the sun could not come to the town, the town had to come to the sun, and so he built a ski lift instead. In 2014, after a decade of research into advanced technologies, local artist Martin Andersen was able to raise enough funds to build three giant solar- and wind-powered mirrors. From their position at the top of the hill, they follow the sun on its trajectory across the sky, capturing its rays and beaming them down to the town square.
Photo courtesy of Reindeer Herder’s Association.
Photo: Trond Stegarud/Gaustatoppen Booking
Artefacts
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BEERMITTEN The Arctic
THE AXE REINVENTED Sipoo, Finland
Drinking beer outside in the sub-zero temperatures of an Arctic winter? Sure, why not, if your mittens can get a secure grip on a slick glass bottle or aluminium can (or if you don’t mind freezing your hands off). Enter the ølvotter, or beermitten. Its circular knitting forms a special pocket just right for a beer bottle or can. The beer drinker keeps his or her hands warm, and the beer is kept at the right temperature. Though its exact origins have not been established, the beermitten seems to have been in use for a number of decades in Nordic countries. Eminently practical, endlessly customisable and easily shared via free online knitting patterns, the beermitten has made its way across the Arctic via Norway, Iceland, the US, and Canada, all the way west to Alaska. Download a free knitting pattern and make your own: w-t-w.co/beermitten
In use since prehistoric times, the axe has been refined over time. Still, the average axe has serious disadvantages, as any woodchopper can tell you: it’s hard on your back and risky for your legs. When it strikes a log off-centre it can rebound dangerously, so the safest bet is to strike the log in the centre, where it is unfortunately the most difficult to split. While clearing trees on his plot in Sipoo, Finland, retired air-traffic controller Heikki Kärnä experienced these problems first-hand and became obsessed with solving them. After years of trial and error, Kärnä launched the Vipukirves leveraxe. After its blade penetrates the surface of the wood the head rotates to the side, creating a leverage effect that splits the wood. The rotation also leaves the axe head flat on the top of the log, steadying it and keeping it positioned for the next strike.
Photo: PB, Beermitten knitted by Pauline Kettlewood, Woool yarn store, The Hague
Photo courtesy of Vipukirves.
Per Kristian Bergmo is a freelance photographer with a degree in archaeology. He once moved to Barcelona, only to return to his native Arctic Norway, where he feels most at home.
AN ANCIENT DESIGN IN A MODERN AGE
A lรกvvu frame silhouetted against the Northern Lights in Padjelanta National Park, Northern Sweden. Employing a wood-burning stove instead of a centre
fire pit makes it easy to keep heated even in the Arctic winter. Photo courtesy of Picture Alliance.
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The lávvu served for centuries as portable housing for reindeer herders. Its practical, efficient design and cultural heritage are attracting new users across Scandinavia.
An indigenous Sámi family in front of its goahti, a larger, more elongated tent (in the foreground) and lávvu (in the background) in Kanstadfjord, Norway in 1896. Photo: Unknown
Travellers who drive along the E6 through northern Norway soon encounter the lávvu. This traditional Sámi dwelling somewhat resembles the tipis of the North American Indians, but is built lower to the ground to withstand the fierce winds and sub-zero temperatures of the far north. Nevertheless, unlike its larger cousin, the goahti, it is a temporary structure, designed to be easily disassembled, transported and reassembled as the reindeer herds migrate across the tundra. Perfectly adapted to the needs of the semi-nomadic reindeer herders of the Arctic, this remarkably resilient design is enjoying a broader popularity throughout Scandinavia today. Construction of the lávvu begins with three long poles whose top ends are notched or forked so that they interlock with each other. These poles form a sturdy tripod against which additional poles are laid to fill out the structure’s form. The walls, traditionally sewn together from reindeer hides, are today made of light, sturdy fabrics draped over the frame in such a way as to leave a smoke hole at the top and air
vents at the bottom, since a fire burns in the centre of the lávvu to heat the interior and keep mosquitoes away. Freestanding and stable without requiring the use of stakes, guy ropes or a central pole, this simple, yet ingenious structure is extremely practical, energy-efficient and, at least in its original form, built wholly from locally available materials. Although this design has a documented history that reaches back at least 2,000 years, it still captures people’s hearts and minds, inspiring artists and anthropologists alike. In 2012 it was awarded the Architectural Prize of the North Norwegian Architects Association, selected for its functionality, but also for its spiritual and cultural significance. The award was accepted on behalf of the lávvu by councillor Marianne Balto of the Norwegian Sámi parliament, who noted that ‘the shapes and ways the lávvu was built represent important values for Sámi culture. The logical basic construction and the use of local materials reflect a culture that values practical knowledge and skills. The choice of materials, not always considered beautiful by
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aesthetic standards, shows the ability and will to adapt to the necessity for survival, something that is of the utmost importance in a culture based on self-reliance’. More than just a functional shelter, however, the lávvu is also important as a gathering place, a structure that creates community. As Reider Breivik, a 72-year-old Norwegian teacher and lávvu enthusiast, says, ‘I fell in love with it in 1980 for its use as a social arena with people sitting in a circle inside, facing each other. The feeling is very similar to sitting around a campfire, and in a way, that is what you do in a lávvu. It creates a great atmosphere where everyone is equal. It is a structure people from all over the world will feel at home in. I once hosted colleagues from Kenya, and as soon as they entered the lávvu they said that it reminded them of their grandmother’s house. They ended up choosing to sleep there instead of in the house for the duration of their stay.’ For Herman Rundberg, the drummer of Violet Road, one of Norway’s most popular bands, the lávvu that his family puts up every year at the Riddu Riddu music festival is a connection to fundamental values: ‘I love the silence
WTW #4
when you wake up in the lávvu on the tundra, or in the mountains, or at a festival camp. The sound of my father lighting the fire at dawn is a moment beautiful beyond words. I also really appreciate that even in these busy, fast-paced, modern times there is a place where you can do something as simple as sitting in a circle around a fireplace and just talking and feeling. It heals your soul and calms you.’ Today the lávvu has been adopted by Scandinavians in general, and for the first time in history its popularity is growing beyond the Sámi community, whose view of the lávvu is somewhat more prosaic. John Henrik Eira (60), an assistant professor of Sámi culture with over 30 years of experience herding reindeer, remarks, ‘Personally I don’t have a romantic relationship with it. I grew up in a family of reindeer herders and to me it represents something we used temporarily, something we used out of necessity. When I was a child we had both a goahti and a lávvu, and it was the goahti that was our main shelter and our home. Of course the lávvu has been a blessing to us reindeer herders. First and foremost, it gave us very good protection against the elements.
An Ancient Design in a Modern Age
Left: Frames for four lรกvvus and a food shelter on the Arctic tundra. With capacities of five to eight people per lรกvvu, such this cluster of shelters could comfortably accommodate 20 or more people for longer periods of time. Photo courtesy of Picture Alliance.
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Top: A lรกvvu on a hill next to a hiking path overlooking the Manndalen valley. This modern version features aluminium poles and synthetic fabric instead of wooden poles and reindeer skins. It also has a wood-burning stove instead of a fire pit, as evinced by the stovepipe visible at the top. Photo: Per Kristian Bergmo
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The traditional lávvu was well suited to the Sámi’s semi-nomadic life. The tundra provided the trees, branches and stones for its frame, and the reindeer herd provided the skins for its walls. Its simple construction and light weight made it easy to dismantle when moving with the herd and quick to reassemble again at the new campsite.
Top: Lávvu frames are usually left standing year round and covered only in the seasons they will be used. The Lyngenfjord in the background has a long Sámi tradition and is known as the meeting point of three peoples: the Sámi, the Kven (immigrants from what is now Finland) and the Norwegians. Photo: Per Kristian Bergmo
Right: A Sámi man in traditional Sámi costume inside his lávvu. The floor is covered with several layers of birch twigs and a layer of reindeer skins. This efficiently separates the interior from the cold ground and keeps the lávvu dry and warm. The central fire pit is used for both cooking and heating, and smoke escapes through the top hole, which also functions as a skylight. Photo courtesy of Picture Alliance.
I especially remember all the times we were wet and cold, and came inside the lávvu to dry our clothes and warm up next to the fireplace. But even though I preferred to stay in the goahti, it was the lávvu that remained in use after reindeer herders began building cabins in the 1960s. We started using new models with new fabrics and foldable aluminium rods, but most importantly we started using small wood-burning stoves instead of a fire pit. This made it much easier to keep warm, and also used a lot less wood. Today we reindeer herders use the lávvu when we mark our herd, during the butchering and other work tending the herd in both summer and winter. For us it is mainly a shelter from the elements.’ New technologies and new materials, far from turning lávvus into relics from the past, have augmented their virtues and their appeal to a wide variety of new users. Fishermen and hunters alike in northern Scandinavia have adopted
them. Lávvus can be spotted next to nearly every popular lake in high season, and a great number are also placed in strategic locations along hiking routes as shelters. They are popular at outdoor festivals of all kinds, and it isn’t unusual to see one behind a family home, serving as an extra bedroom in summer. Kindergartens and schools in the Arctic often have lávvus where stories are told and students are taught about Sámi culture. There are also several small villages scattered along the northern coast that have bought or made lávvus to be used as public meeting places. This renaissance has led to a growing market, and the number of specialised manufacturers in Scandinavia is increasing. But even as the fabrics and materials change, the basic design remains the same. The architectural masterpiece of the ancient Sámi of the north is still thriving, still finding new applications that its creators never dreamed of. ☐
An Ancient Design in a Modern Age
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The Sรกmi are the semi-nomadic indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Russia. Also known as Laplanders, they pursue traditional livelihoods such as reindeer herding and coastal fishing. Norwegian architect Joar Nango and artist Silje Figenschou Thoresen have been researching their culture, focusing particularly on practical examples of the self-reliance of a people with limited resources and an inherent DIY mentality.
Pasvik, Norway Standard wooden pallets are everywhere and are used in a number of ways. Mounted on skis, they make a fine heavy-duty sledge. When the snow melts, they can also be transformed into outdoor furniture for reindeer herders or temporary porch stairs.
Sร MI SELF-SUFFICIENCY
Joar Nango is a Sami-Norwegian artist and architect. He explores native identity issues through contradictions in contemporary architecture and the built environment. Silje Figenschou Thoresen is a Sรกmi artist from Kirkenes who works with structures and sculptures based on the material understanding of the vernacular tradition of the north.
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15 Grense Jakobselv, Norway In a climate where the average yearly temperature is below 0°C (32°F), some standard solutions require modification in order to work. Luckily someone had the bright idea to install this Velcrobased protection on the lock at the local harbour.
Näätämö, Finland Houses in northern Finland are usually situated quite some distance from the road and hence from their mailboxes as well. Residents often modify their mailbox with a flag, the position of which—as set by the postman—can indicate whether it is worth making the trek out to the mailbox.
Jokkmokk, Sweden In Jokkmokk, people who died during the winter used to be put inside this specially constructed fence by the church, since their bodies could not be buried until the ground had thawed.
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Some saw the occupation of the abandoned skyscraper as a legitimate solution to Venezuela’s economic paradox of ‘people without homes and homes without people’. Others saw it as the world’s tallest slum. In any case, turning the empty, unfinished building into a liveable space required perseverance and ingenuity.
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Ramรณn Iriarte is a journalist and political analyst dividing his time between New York City and South America. His study of the contentious politics of squatting movements has led him to visit squats in several countries.
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Previous page: Originally built as the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, this unfinished 45-storey office building stands in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. This centrally located tower is now known as the Torre de David, after David Brillembourg, its late developer
and main investor. Construction of the tower was halted in 1994 as a result of the Venezuelan banking crisis. Photo: Ramón Iriarte This spread: During an oil boom in the 1950s and 1960s Caracas grew in
economic importance. Viewed as one of Latin America’s most modern cities, it underwent explosive development, attracting thousands of rural migrants seeking new economic opportunities. Housing failed to keep pace with the rapidly increasing population, and by
the 1990s more than half of the city's population lived in slums. Controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez urged the poor to occupy ‘unused’ land, prompting squats to spring up in abandoned buildings across the country. Photo: Iwan Baan
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Hipólito lives in a comfortable apartment on the 17th storey of the Torre de David, an enormous abandoned skyscraper complex in the centre of Caracas, Venezuela, a place widely known—and feared—as ‘the world’s tallest slum’. A 51-year-old Colombian soccer coach who immigrated to Venezuela over two decades ago, Hipólito built his home from scratch with his own hands and the help of a couple of friends of the family. He is effusively gracious from the first moment, perhaps because someone already tipped him off to the ‘Colombian reporter’ roaming the extensive corridors of the building. He is watching a football game on his huge flat-screen TV, and his wife is baking a cake for a children’s party that is taking place later that night on the 12th storey. She bakes and sells cakes for Left: The 192 m (630 ft) Torre de David, the third-tallest building in Venezuela, was occupied by a group of homeless squatters on September 17, 2007. The first families initially set up tents and shelters in the ground-floor lobby; weeks later, they occupied and reorganised most of the building. Nearly 3,000
birthdays and anniversaries in the community, making a little money on the side to contribute to the household. The heat from the oven adds to the already oppressive heat of the Caracas afternoon. Outside it’s 40°C (104°F), but inside, the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the tower create an oppressive greenhouse effect, a relentless reminder that the building’s ventilation system was never completed. Still, Hipólito is clearly very proud of the apartment that now stands where once there was nothing but a flat space full of rubble. He is very grateful, mentioning repeatedly that he is lucky that the people in charge of the building have given him the opportunity to have a decent place to live with his family. This ‘decent place to live’ was originally
people have lived in this self-governed community in the heart of the former financial district. Photo: Iwan Baan Top: Simon Rafael La Rosa has been living on the 22nd floor of Torre de David for five years, along with his wife, son and dog. Like many of the tower
residents, he is politically active, a committed supporter of the late Hugo Chávez and his Socialist Party. He and his family are waiting to be relocated to a new home, but Simon is thankful to the government for the opportunity to live in the tower. Photo: Ramón Iriarte
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Left: Because it has no functional elevators, the building is occupied only up to the 28th floor. While the occupied areas are in a state of constant modification, the upper part of the building looks just the way it was left in 1994. The stairs, which have been equipped with only minimal improvised safety measures, are the only way to get up and down. Those with vehicles use the ten-storey parking structure next to the main tower to get closer to their flats. For a small fee, entrepreneurial drivers ferry people and goods ten floors up or down. Photo: Ramón Iriarte Right: Each of the inhabited floors has coordinators and maintenance workers like Cheo, who oversees the plumbing system. Photo: Ramón Iriarte
supposed to be Venezuela’s biggest financial centre, the project of a group of wealthy financiers led by David Brillembourg. It would have housed the headquarters of Banco Metropolitano and Grupo Financiero Confinanzas, as well as foreign companies attracted to Venezuela by a series of neo-liberal economic reforms popularly known as ‘the package’. A condition of the disbursement of a new US$4.5 billion (€3.5 billion) loan by the International Monetary Fund, the package privatised state companies, dropped interest rates and liberalised oil prices, aggravating an economic situation already troubled by plunging international oil prices. Shortly after Brillembourg’s death in 1993 and in the midst of the financial crash that
affected many Latin-American economies in the early nineties, his development and construction company went bankrupt and was expropriated by the government. Construction stopped abruptly, and the unfinished 45-storey tower was abandoned for the following 15 years. As the government tried unsuccessfully to find private investors to complete the project, drug and housing mafias took control of the space, and vandalism, looting and crime reigned within and around it. The Torre de David or Tower of David, nicknamed after its deceased developer, became part of Caracas’ urban landscape, generating endless myths, tales, and anecdotes that thrived on the everyday coffee-table conversations of the locals.
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According to the capitalist point of view, housing is a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. According to the socialist principles espoused by Hugo Chávez, it is a fundamental right of every citizen, and the Torre de David is one of the greatest symbols of the defeat of capitalism.
The horror stories, many of them true, abounded until 2007, when a group of 200 families who were unable to find housing after losing their homes to floods decided to occupy the building. These families are now known as the pioneros (pioneers), the first of some 750 families to make their homes in the first 28 storeys of the tower. Inspired by the socialist revolutionary ideology of Hugo Chávez (president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013), they and others like them undertook projects that appropriated abandoned private property and redistributed it among working-class families who needed a place to live. Today the interior of the Torre de David looks nothing like an office building, but more like a huge apartment complex,
albeit one in which each unit is different from the others: though they all start as an equal, empty portion of the unfinished building, each one, like Hipólito’s, is finished by its occupants according to their needs, resources and ingenuity. They range from the basic to the more luxurious, from naked brick walls to fancier tile floors. As different as the apartments may be, each resident has the same community duties and responsibilities, which are specified by a list of actively enforced rules of coexistence. According to Daisy Monsalve, a young assistant nurse at the delivery room of the Caracas University Hospital, and one of the first residents of the Torre de David, each floor nominates delegates who allocate rotating responsibilities to each
Tower of David
There are 750 families living in the building, each in a residence that differs in size and form according to the skills, abilities and tastes of its inhabitants.
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Apartments from the 7th to the 16th storey tend to be well developed, as they were originally intended to serve as hotel rooms. By supplementing their
family: each unit has the duty to clean floors and hallways once a week. Waxing the floors, painting the walls, and other general maintenance tasks are communal duties carried out when the delegates call for it. Daisy thinks the bad image that surrounds the Torre de David in the eyes of many locals, not to mention the international press, precedes the occupation: ‘This has always been a bad neighbourhood,’ she says, ‘and since the occupation, everybody blames everything bad that happens around here on Torre residents. They say we’re thugs, robbers, scum… but we’re honest, hardworking people, and this has always been a bad area of Caracas.’ She has been living for five years now in the apartment she built with her
incomes with ingenuity, however, residents manage to create spaces that are not only liveable, but personal as well. Photo: Iwan Baan
ex-husband, working late shifts at the hospital by night and working on her home by day, and she has never had a problem even though she often comes in and out late at night. Like Hipólito, she is very grateful to have a roof over her head, and sees the tower as her permanent home. The prime downtown location and good community relations make her hope she will never have to leave. ‘When I got here, everything was destroyed, the roof, the walls, the stairs. It was full of rubble and trash, and we cleaned the entire building, which was a great sacrifice. That is why I feel so empowered over this space, because of everything we did to recover it.’ Conditions have improved dramatically since those early days. The inhabitants have managed
to build a plumbing system that efficiently pumps water for several hours a day to the 20 to 30 families that live on each of the first 28 storeys. Occupants also filed and won a case to have the city’s electricity company install a proper electric grid throughout the building after looters stole most of what little remained from the original construction. Many squatters—like Hipólito, who rarely misses a Copa del Rey, Calcio, or Premier League game—subscribe to a cable service or use makeshift pirate antennas to get television and Internet connections in their apartments. A profusion of corners, rooms and improvised units lodge all types of commerce and services from regular bodegas to a tattoo parlour located on the 20th storey. However, not all the news for tower residents is good. Rumours of imminent evictions constantly come and go, and many detractors of the occupation movement (even within the government of Nicolas Maduro, former vice president to Chávez) are permanently lobbying, not without valid arguments, against the use of this space for urban housing. Gustavo Izaguirre, architect and dean of the Urbanism and Architecture Department of the Central University of Venezuela, is one of those detractors. He claims that Venezuela’s strategies to combat the housing deficit are misguided, that they are pushing people to take over what he calls ‘unsuitable living spaces’ such as the Torre de David. Indeed, few would consider a daily 28-storey climb, some of that up stairways without handrails, already the site of more than one fatal fall, to be a feature of a suitable living space. A home, according to Izaguirre, is not merely a structure with a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and bedrooms, but a much deeper concept. It is a space envisioned and constructed for specific contexts and needs, a space thoughtfully integrated with its urban surroundings. It is a concept as attractive as it is distant from the reality of Venezuelan squats. The complexities of the housing dynamics in Latin-American cities continue to set academic and political theories against the social and economic facts of life. And though the Venezuelan government’s housing programme has built more than half a million residences for the homeless since the start of Chávez’s revolution, many people continue to face great difficulties in
On the day that Nicolas Alvarez and Paola Medina moved into the Torre de David it took seven trips to carry their belongings up the 27 storeys to their new home. As Nicolas says, ‘Sometimes you walk up, and right when you open the door of the apartment, you realise you needed to buy something, like soap or toothpaste… man! It’s hard to get used to, but we are getting extremely fit!’
While residents pay no rent, they do pay a monthly fee of 150 Bolívares fuertes (€18.60/US$23.80) for water, electricity, security and cleaning of public spaces. Additionally, because of the instability of Venezuelan currency, many families invest in home improvements or even rental properties. Photo: Iwan Baan
Tower of David
On January 8, 2011, Hugo Chávez gave a speech in Caracas, in which he expropriated seven properties belonging to Polar Industries and authorised their occupation, calling the Occupation Movement an example of selfmanagement, a weapon in the war against the paradox of ‘people without houses and houses without people’.
finding decent housing due to market structures resulting from decades of governmental disregard for socioeconomic inequality. Those like Izaguirre regard the squat as a hazardous, crimeridden place, an example of ‘anti-housing’, but for Hipólito, Daisy, and hundreds of other families, this colossal vertical neighbourhood is, at least for now, their home. Addendum: On July 24, 2014 the Venezuelan government began the process of evacuating the Torre de David, moving residents of the squat to Ciudad Zamora, a large housing complex in the municipality of Cúa, south of Caracas. As of mid-September, 50% of the occupants had been relocated, and if ‘Operation Zamora 2014’ goes according to schedule the entire building will be vacant by the end of 2014. What will become of it in the future is as yet unknown. ☐
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The Liter of Light project brings affordable, sustainable solar light to areas beyond the reach of the power grid. More than that, however, it brings hope to economically disadvantaged communities using a scalable social enterprise model with effects that reach far beyond the glow of a tiny LED.
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Phillip Gangan is a writer based in the Netherlands. He writes about design and entrepreneurship, and for this story he returned to his former home town Manila, Philippines. Kurt Alvarez is a photographer based in Manila.
A LITRE AT A TIME
The residents of the remote fishing village in Dampalit received an unexpected gift last Christmas. Situated on the outskirts of Malabon City on the northwestern border of Metro Manila, the informal settlement had always been smothered in darkness come nightfall. Now, strung along the winding dirt road that connects the community to the rest of civilisation are rows of solar-powered streetlights encased in one-litre plastic bottles. Suspended from tall, whitewashed PVC pipes like shining drops of water from gangling faucets, they illuminate the surrounding night with a soft, white glow. Plastic soda bottles also dot the roofs of the village’s ramshackle houses, set into the corrugated metal. Ordinarily, they are filled with a solution of purified water and bleach, refracting sunlight into the house during the day. In the case of Dampalit they also sport one-watt LEDs powered by small, rectangular solar panels that jut out of the bottles’ spouts. Like the street
lamps, these units light up at dusk, providing solar-powered light to the poorest of the poor. ‘Before, it was very, very dark,’ says Edna Nava, a long-standing village resident. Like so many people in the developing world, she and her family live in an area far removed from public lighting. Armed with rudimentary headlamps or torches, they would carefully traverse the extended stretch of earth leading to and from the main road. ‘We were really scared,’ she admits. ‘Back in the day, we did not have electricity, only kerosene lamps. After we finished our supper, we would put them out and go to bed. Now, when it gets dark, you can see the lights turn on one by one. It’s actually quite amusing to watch.’ Thanks in part to the Philippines’ My Shelter Foundation and the City of Malabon, Nava’s village was one of the first communities in Metro Manila to receive this unique form of solarpowered light. What began as a plastic bottle on the roof has evolved into a sustainable lighting
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The Liter of Light solar bulb is made of a plastic bottle, water, a tablespoon of bleach (to prevent mould) and a drop of glue. It provides light to 28,000 homes in Metro Manila alone and can be found in countries from Argentina to Zambia.
In order to provide adequate street lighting to off-grid areas, the City of Malabon donated 50 Liter of Light street lamps to the remote fishing village of Dampalit. The village was one of the first communities in Metro Manila to receive this form of solar-powered lighting.
project geared towards helping underprivileged neighbourhoods in countries where climate change is having a destructive impact. The programme is known as ‘A Liter of Light’ (Isang Litrong Liwanag). Inspired by other green innovations from across the globe, the My Shelter Foundation launched A Liter of Light in April 2011, bringing eco-friendly solar bottle bulbs to impoverished communities all over the world. Their goal is to light one million homes by 2015. Pioneered by Brazilian mechanic Alfredo Moser and further developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the device is based on Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s principles of Appropriate Technology, an approach which employs small-scale, easily replicable innovations to meet the basic human needs of developing communities.
‘Even before, we were designing windows made out of plastic bottles,’ says Illac Diaz, founder of the My Shelter Foundation. ‘Only after doing that for a year did we come across Alfredo Moser, who put them on the roof.’ Diaz, then a student at MIT, took up the challenge of building a scalable social enterprise around the solar bottle bulb as part of the foundation’s mission to develop climate-adaptive architecture. Given the Philippines’ susceptibility to severe, weather-related catastrophes, Diaz is convinced that investing in skills-based resiliency is the ideal means to tackle cyclical, climate-related challenges. ‘The Liter of Light is actually a day-andnight solution,’ Diaz says. The solar bottle bulb provides up to 55 watts of light during the day, while the solar power upgrade—comprised of one-watt or three-watt LEDs—operates in the
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Top: These solar panels provide up to ten hours of light, enabling villagers to walk about safely after dark. They are the only component of the solar bottle bulb that is not available locally; Liter of Light imports them from China and sells them nearly at cost to participating entrepreneurs. Left: Angelito Santos and Joselito Olaivar demonstrate the inner workings of the solar bottle bulb. Liter of Light volunteers regularly visit impoverished communities such as Dampalit to train residents to assemble, install and repair the plastic bulbs and solar-powered units. The project provides a muchneeded source of livelihood for the less fortunate.
evening. In keeping with the project’s principles, the circuit is easy to assemble. LEDs are wired to miniature solar panels with the use of a copper board. Its rechargeable batteries are a generic component found in nearly all computers. ‘Basically, it’s composed of mostly locally available materials,’ Diaz claims. ‘We just import the solar panels from China. Even leftover parts from electronic waste can be harvested to build solar lights.’ On average, the solar bottle bulb generates energy savings of up to €7 (US$9) a month–a hefty sum considering that one in four Filipinos lives on less than €1 (US$1.30) a day. ‘It’s such a great burden,’ Nava says. ‘Especially now, electricity is very expensive. Before, we used to pay 1,200 Philippine Pesos (€21 or US$26.70) [every month]. Now it has risen to 1,500 pesos (€26.20 or US$33.40). That’s only for electricity.
We still have to pay for food.’ With the solar power upgrade, Nava not only gets to save on her energy bills, but she also receives round-theclock solar-powered light. The My Shelter Foundation also offers technical training to the recipients of the solar bottle bulbs in cooperation with the Philippines’ national training centre (TESDA), local government units, NGOs and a growing network of volunteers. Residents of economically disadvantaged communities are taught how to assemble, install and repair the plastic bulbs and solar-powered units. In order to build a social enterprise, the foundation supplies wholesale materials almost at cost to grassroots entrepreneurs nationwide, establishing a much-needed source of livelihood for the less fortunate. ‘The Liter of Light is not and has never been the plastic bottle on the roof,’ Diaz says. ‘It is
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A solar bottle bulb lights up a small sari-sari (convenience) store in the fishing village of Dampalit. Before the arrival of the Liter of Light, residents had to rely on kerosene lamps and electric torches to find their way around the village after sundown.
really a one-bottle, one-watt-per-house social enterprise.’ He hopes that recipients of the solar bottle bulb will use some of their monthly savings to buy the solar power upgrade. ‘Once you have a plastic bottle on the roof, it’s an easy sell for us to get people to spend 700 pesos (€12.20 or US$15.60) for the nightlight. It’s so simple to just twist off the cap and then lock the kit in. It’s our foot in the door or our hole in the roof, so to speak.’ The revenue generated from the sale of solar-powered units is used to offset the costs of the foundation’s regional production centres, which mainly employ women’s cooperatives, inmates from correctional institutions and persons with disabilities. ‘Even with no knowledge of electronics, they can assemble the light after just one hour of training,’ says Angelito Santos, a Liter of Light trainer from the City of Malabon Polytechnic
Institute (CMPI). ‘The circuit is very simple. We only need to teach them how to attach the solar panel because they can already see from the pictorial which part goes here and which part goes there. That’s why it’s so easy.’ Assisted by CMPI students, he and co-trainer Joselito Olaivar educate the village residents of Dampalit on how to build and maintain the solar power upgrades. As a frequent visitor to the fishing community, Santos has witnessed first-hand the massive impact of the Liter of Light. ‘In the past, they really couldn’t see where they were going. Even if you are familiar with the area, it’s still intimidating. Now, even the children get to go out at night. They were very happy when we first arrived because their neighbourhood got brighter.’ Elsewhere in the Philippines, the Liter of Light illuminates more than 36,000 homes
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Liter of Light is a global open source move ment, developed by Alfredo Moser of Brazil in 2002, aiming to provide affordable and sustainable light to places where electricity is not available.
Thanks to the new solar-powered streetlights, children are now able to walk around the village safely at night.
and villages, particularly in remote disaster areas that were completely devastated during Typhoon Haiyan, the deadliest hurricane ever recorded in the country’s history. ‘Our aim for climate-challenged societies is that people would be ready,’ Diaz says. ‘If [a calamity] hit them, somehow the materials would be there. The knowledge would already be in the community and we would just help consolidate it all.’ A Liter of Light creates sustainable solutions ahead of the storm, working to address the damage wrought by natural disasters before it occurs. The project empowers residents of the affected areas with the necessary skills to adapt to dire circumstances, thereby minimising their dependence on humanitarian aid. ‘It’s a bottom-up approach, using parts from electronic junk and building a skills-base of people,’ Diaz explains. ‘Not only does it save power,
but in times of emergencies like in Tacloban, when the whole power grid goes down, you can immediately mobilise people to build them. It’s a completely new way of reorienting yourself.’ Active in over 20 countries, A Liter of Light has provided more than 360,000 solar bottle bulbs to families all over the world, enriching their lives with a device as effective as its design is simple. ‘We’re thinking about the smallest watt, but, multiplied in the millions, it might be the most powerful energy source that nobody has thought about,’ Diaz says. ‘It’s cacheing solar energy; that’s what the Liter of Light is. We deal with it a bottle at a time.’ That something as simple as a plastic bottle can bring such benefits to so many people shows that sustainable solutions need not be complex or even expensive to help those in need. ☐
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Whether across desert sands or mountain snows, whether in daylight or darkness, parents all over the world do whatever it takes to get their kids safely to school and back.
BRINGING KIDS TO SCHOOL
The Hague, the Netherlands Photos by Bruno van der Elshout Top: Barbara (41) and her children Pepijn (7), Elias (3), Ruben (3) and Mira (5) live 1.9 km (1.2 mi) or 15 minutes by bike from their school. She takes them there and back twice a week by Onderwater Family Tandem bike, a sturdy design by Ronald Onderwater that allows children to enjoy the cycling experience while the adult controls the bike. This XL model in the photo seats one adult and three children. Bad weather won’t stop Barbara from cycling, although her husband occasionally takes the kids to school by car.
Right: Merijn (4), Finn (5) and Thijme (2) are taken to school by their father in the morning. While he takes the car, their mother Saskia (32) brings them back by bakfiets, a common Dutch freight tricycle, usually while ‘walking’ her dogs Sem (9) and Noa (8). It takes her 25 minutes to make it to school, a 4.5 km (2.8 mi) ride. During bad weather, they put a roof over the cabin to keep the kids dry. Saskia herself puts on a raincoat, while the dogs simply get wet.
Tromsø, Norway Photo by Alice Polenghi and Kristina Schröder Between October and April, Tromsø, the second-largest town in the Arctic, is covered by snow. The snow makes it difficult for cars and two-wheelers, but there is a benefit too—kids can use a spark, a small sledge consisting of a chair mounted on a pair of flexible metal runners. The spark or the kicksled is in common use in Nordic countries, where roads are not sanded or salted. Tatiana (37) and her son Henrik (3) use a spark for the short commute to the kindergarten, and more often during the weekends for a fun ride. In rural areas of Norway, the spark is a typical way to traverse even longer distances. Just like other vehicles, sparks have their special parking places, indicated by road signs.
20 km north of Harare, Zimbabwe Photos by Graham van de Ruit Rural Zimbabwe lacks comprehensive paved road infrastructure. The inadequate transport options combined with relatively high transportation costs result in a large section of the population having to walk significant distances. Ashley Munamati (12) wakes up at 4AM every day and walks about 3 km (1.9 mi) on a gravel road to school.
(L−R) Wayne Rufazi (8), James Chitunhu (11), Munashe Kadunha (8) and Denis Satsvai (12) join up for the 3 km (1.9 mi) walk to Chogugudza Primary School. Their journey takes them over a small granite hill.
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Mondrai, Andhra Pradesh, India Photos by Harsha Vadlamani Rickshaws are one of the most common means of transportation in India, and commuting to schools is no exception. Top: (L–R) Theeti Akhila (13), Theeti Meghana (12) and Banoth Kavitha (13) travel to their school in Mondrai in Warangal district of Telangana, India in a shared seven-seater motor‑ cycle rickshaw. The distance from Ballariguda, their village, to
Mondrai is about 3 km, for which the driver normally charges about ten Rupees. For the kids, however, he only charges two. Bottom: (L–R) Theeti Akhila (13), Salemtra Pranaya (13) and Theeti Meghana (12) get out of the rickshaw at Mondrai and head towards school.
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Jonah Goodman lives in Berlin with hundreds of unread books and is–more or less–interested in everything. Almost two decades after the siege of Sarajevo ended, he went there to understand what had happened, and how everyday people managed to cope.
IMPROVISED DESIGN IN THE SIEGE OF SARAJEVO
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Previous spread: Sarajevo in June 1992 during the height of the siege. Serbian forces outside the city continuously shelled the poorly armed Bosnian defenders. Inside the city, the Serbs controlled most of the major military positions and snipers took up strategic positions. By September 1993 it was estimated that virtually all the buildings in Sarajevo had suffered some degree of damage, and 35,000 of them, including hospitals and libraries, were completely destroyed. Photo: Antoine Gyori/Sygma/Corbis
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Top: June 1995. A woman traverses Grbavica quarter, the scene of intensive street fighting during the siege, carrying a water container from the public cisterns. During the periods when the Serb nationalists cut off the water supply, this was a risky and laborious task that had to be performed at least once daily. Photo courtesy of Gamma Presse Images / Hollandse Hoogte.
Cut off from the outside world for four years by a besieging army, with food, water, electricity, fuel and weapons in short supply, the people of Sarajevo faced a daily choice: improvise and adapt or die.
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Sarajevo residents in April, 1993 picking wild plants along the infamous Sniper Alley, (the city’s main boulevard, where more than 200 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded by Serbian sharpshooters during the war). A local publisher produced a pamphlet telling readers how to make nutritious meals from dandelions, nettles and other unusual food sources. Photo: Jerome Delay, Associated Press
Dr Stevan Šubara opens the kitchen window of his eighth-storey Sarajevo apartment, leans out, and points to the shallow river Miljacka, 300 m (950 ft) to his right. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘this was the front line.’ Twenty years earlier, the besieging Serb nationalist army had lain beyond it, firing mortars, shells and sniper rounds across the water every day. ‘The Bosnian army,’ says Šubara, turning left to gesture the same distance uphill, ‘were shooting from there, trying to aim between the buildings.’ Reaching out around the frame, he taps a huge metal plate fastened to the exterior wall. ‘And this is where the shell hit. It was about two in the morning, and we were
sleeping on the floor. Ten centimetres (4 in) to the right and it would have hit our bed.’ The Serb nationalist blockade of Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern warfare. Beginning on April 5, 1992, when gunmen opened fire on a peace rally, it lasted almost four years. During that whole time Stevan and Majda Šubara lived in their apartment in the 20-storey tower at 11 Kolodvorska Street, one minute’s walk from the notorious ‘Sniper Alley’. The safest place on the eighth storey was the communal landing next to the elevator, and the Šubaras, like their neighbours Ismet Milak and Mustafa and Fatima Dizdarević, spent most of their time there. Milak
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Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence on March 3, 1992. A month later, Sarajevo came under what was to be the longest siege of a city in the history of modern warfare. Lasting 1,425 days, the siege was over 500 days longer than the Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.
and the Dizdarevićes were Bosnian Muslims, and with Stevan, a Serb, and Majda, a Croat, they formed a typically Sarajevan mix of ethnicities. Formerly strangers, they quickly became ‘like one family,’ says Fatima, thrown together by the conflict. ‘We never imagined that there would be a war,’ says Milak, ‘and as soon as it seemed imminent, the supermarkets emptied out. We had plenty of money, but it was all in bank accounts, and then the banks closed. We had fridges full of food, but no electricity. To stop the food spoiling, we had to boil it, but the water was turned off. We couldn’t move around the city. People were being killed all the time. And things got worse with the winter. No wood. No food. No water. Just war. You had to find ways to survive.’ For these neighbours on the eighth storey of 11 Kolodvorska Street, improvisation became a way of life, just as it did for all 435,000 people trapped inside a strip of city 13 km (8 mi) long and 5 km (3 mi) wide. For four years, Sarajevans subsisted on meagre humanitarian aid, drank from wells, foraged for food and scavenged for fuel. Their gas, electricity and water mains ran through the territory held by the Serb nationalists, who switched them on infrequently and irregularly as part of a comprehensive campaign to inflict psychological distress. Winding east to west along the Miljacka river, Sarajevo is flanked on every side by steep hills from which the Serb nationalist army rained shells onto the inhabitants—an average of 329 a day in the first two years of the war—while snipers, sighting along the wide streets, conducted
executions of random civilians. By the time the siege was over, approximately 30,000 civilians had been wounded and at least 4,954 killed, including 1,601 children. ‘Don’t let them sleep,’ Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić ordered his men in May 1992. ‘Drive them crazy.’ By then, in the words of Milak, shells were ‘falling like pears’. Many Sarajevans had sheltered in basements and bunkers for the first weeks of the war, but by the end of April most had already returned to their homes. Life had to go on, and urgent new priorities were emerging. ‘Water was the most important thing,’ says Šubara. ‘Electricity was the most important thing,’ Milak corrects him, ‘or those two things together.’ Depending who you ask, Sarajevans also say the same of fuel, food and weapons. In truth, all were crucial, and none were in adequate supply. The most laborious task, however, was fetching water. When the taps ran dry on the upper storeys of a building, Sarajevans would visit neighbours on lower levels to see what was left in the pipes. If a whole building ran dry, people would follow the water downhill, find working facilities, fill containers, and carry it back up again. Trips had to be made daily, and home-made water trolleys became ubiquitous. A typical example is the device built by Vefik Hadžismajlović, then the director of Sarajevo’s National Gallery, to carry water from his workplace to his home. A 20-litre plastic jerrycan was bound with rags to a wooden board mounted on the wheelbase from a suitcase. It was a practical solution, but only a partial one: he still had to
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Bringing water home from Sarajevo’s wells was a daily mission and one of the hardest challenges for the city’s inhabitants. Wheels were salvaged from suitcases and skateboards to make the task manageable. Photo: James Mollison
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carry the water up the stairs to his fourth-storey flat, and over time the plastic canister softened and bulged over the plank. The queues at public cisterns were so long, and the labour of getting water home so arduous that people left their taps on, keeping an ear out for the sound of dripping. Elma Hodžić, now an art history graduate, was three when the siege began. She has an early memory of waking one night to see the moon shining up at her from the bedroom floor. Her grandmother had stored potatoes in the kitchen sink, and one had rolled over the plughole as the water came back on. The ensuing flood, a disaster for the family, was a moment of real excitement for the young girl: it was her first experience of bathing. Though she was young, Hodžić’s recollections from the war are nonetheless vivid. She has a particularly strong memory of the time her young mother ran out of shoelaces to use as wicks and began cutting strips from her dresses to serve as substitutes. The wicks were for their kandilo, a rudimentary, long-burning lamp made by pouring water and a little oil or fat into a container with a floating wick. The name and basic design of the kandilo are derived from the hanging lamps in Serbian Orthodox churches, but Fatima Dizdarević remembers being introduced to it by a neighbour and chemistry professor who gave her a home-made version as a gift. Word spread quickly, and along with water trolleys and tin-can stoves, the kandilo stands as a defining object of the siege. ‘They were the worst thing ever’, remembers Hodžić. ‘When you woke up in the morning your nose would be full of something really black from the candles, and the walls would be yellow.’ One effect of the flood in the Hodžić household was the disintegration of their parquet floors. At first, the wooden blocks were used as toys by Elma and her brother, but eventually all of them found their way into the stove, along with Elma’s Lego bricks and her mother’s high heels. Burning solid fuels—from wood to books
to cloth to plastic—was an obvious solution to the lack of reliable electricity and gas supplies. In the written testimony that accompanied the donation of his improvised stove to the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, journalist Slavko Nastić describes the situation: ‘In June (1992), my neighbours started making fires behind our building to cook food. It was a collective fire. We would all wait in turn, but some brought wood and some didn’t. I soon abandoned the idea of collectivism and set about making my own metal stove.’ Nastić began by foraging for material in an old, derelict hospital building. What he found determined the dimensions of his 30 cm (1 ft)-high stove as, using one small welder and nails beaten into rivets, he installed a barbecue gridiron to function as a fire grate and placed metal plates within the oven to slow air circulation and conserve heat. The whole thing stood on long legs, such that a short stovepipe, without any need for extra joints, could reach his home’s chimney, 65 cm (2.1 ft) above the floor. During the siege, design ingenuity was often about more than the individual, physical need to survive. In 1992, Stjepan Dedović was a successful Sarajevo architect, but the war transformed him into a full-time caregiver for his wife, who had been left immobile by a massive stroke. Her condition required that she be washed daily, more than doubling the volume of water Dedović had to supply. Nearly 70 years old at the time, he provided for them both, carrying water three times a day 2 km (1.2 mi) from the nearest well and up the stairs to their fourth-storey apartment. Bombardment was a constant threat. A shell partially destroyed the roof of their home, and once, while he was fetching water, two men were blown to pieces in front of him. He kept walking, straight past the bodies. Today, Dedović is a tall, strong 90-year-old with a gentle face and an infectious laugh, who warns, correctly, that he ‘is older than he looks’. Despite his good humour, his is a story marked
From top left: Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) could be fired at the besieging army with this specially made launcher. RPGs landing in the city would often fail to explode and be salvaged by the defenders. Radio put together from salvaged components. Low-powered appliances such as this would run on car batteries prised from vehicles with empty tanks and
nowhere to go. Thermal flask made by Vefik Hadžismajlović, then director of the National Gallery in Sarajevo, from a glass decanter wrapped in polystyrene and cardboard. Handmade wooden periscope built by members of the Bosnian army’s 102nd motorised brigade. Photo: James Mollison
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Before the war, most Sarajevans used electricity to cook and heat their homes, and when the supply was cut off, wood-burning stoves became the city’s most in-demand items. In 1992, a well-made version could fetch as much as 150 Deutschmarks (US$150 or €118 today). Photo: James Mollison
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‘Everything was disordered in the war,’ says Fejzić. ‘It was chaos. Everything depended on how you looked at that chaos.’
by profound personal tragedy. One day, a mortar landing outside his building killed his 11-yearold granddaughter on the doorstep of his home. Struggling with the loss, Dedović continued to care for his wife, but she too died before the war’s end. To make life bearable Dedović directed his attention to building sophisticated home improvements, which he documented with technical drawings and tongue-in-cheek titles. The pišalo, or ‘pisser’ was a device for conserving water by channelling it into a pressurised stream. A weight attached to a pulley suspended one end of a thin, flexible tube, while the other rested inside a full five-litre (1.3gal) jerrycan. With one hand, he could pull the open end lower than the jerrycan to unleash a thin, forceful jet of water. His other inventions included a hinged door in a gutter to collect rainwater, a device called the ‘launcher’ that directed the light from a candle, and the ‘rattle’, a non-electric doorbell that announced visitors by shaking a can of pebbles in the kitchen. Dedović’s greatest creation, however, was a highly efficient stove. A sliding drawer at its base allowed him to modulate air intake at one end, while twin exhaust flues crafted from food tins provided excellent ventilation at the other. The setup made it possible to cook an entire meal on the energy produced by burning a single piece of parquet floor. As the siege progressed, a standard design for solid fuel stoves began to emerge, based on one of the most widely available sources of metal in the city: used five-litre (1.3 gal) cans
from humanitarian food aid. These large, empty tins would be set on three flat strips of metal bent outwards into feet at the end. On one side, a door was installed over a window cut out of the can, and on the other a stovepipe jutted out, providing ventilation. On many of the stoves, design signatures such as the neat styling of their hinged doors identified the tradesman that made them. Rather than build their own, people would buy these stoves from small craft workshops for 100 to 150 Deutschmarks (approximately US$100–150 or €78–117 today), giving rise to an economy that turned rubbish into valuable survival items. Inspired by this simple design (and perhaps deterred by the price), some built imitation versions. On display at the Historical Museum is the stove built by Professor Enver Imamović, a respected archaeologist and historian, at that time the director of Sarajevo’s National Museum. Its door may be roughly rendered, and the stovepipe crudely fashioned from an old meat tin, but all the elements of a classic workshop-made, five-litre-can stove are visible, right down to the three metal strip legs, which, though serviceable, are attached back-to-front. Ultimately, shelling would blow the glass from almost every window in Sarajevo. Before it did, those living in modern apartments knocked holes through external walls to make space for the chimneys needed by their new stoves. Most households ran on electricity in pre-war Sarajevo, but as anthropologist Ivana Maček writes in her 2009 book Sarajevo Under Siege, ‘toward the end of 1993, and especially in 1994
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and 1995, the gas network was extended.’ Wood was expensive as early as 1992, notes Maček, at 200 Deutschmarks (US$200 or €157 today) per cubic metre, and gas, though only intermittently available, and then only in small quantities, was a smart option. ‘The streets were crisscrossed by ditches for new gas pipes that led from one house to another,’ she writes. Installed by amateurs, these ‘plastic pipes with leaky joints’ ran unprotected across apartment floors. Explosions were common. Amar Karapus, now a curator at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, remembers one such incident from the winter of 1993. His neighbour, a deaf-mute who lived in a firststorey apartment across the street, was returning to his flat from drinking coffee with friends in one of the flats above him. As he opened his front door, he reached inside for a kandilo, took it out, and opened his cigarette lighter. The ensuing explosion threw him back ten metres (33 ft) down the corridor and entirely destroyed his home. He survived, but such blasts could easily be lethal, and were caused as much by leaks as by fluctuations in the gas supply. Holding up a steel gorionik, a gas burner small enough to fit into an improvised oven in place of wood, Karapus points out an extra hole drilled into its supply pipe. Sitting outside the cooker, a flame from this opening was both pilot light and visual warning: if it went out, the cooker was a bomb. ‘We used gas for everything,’ says Emir Fejzić, an architecture professor at the University of Sarajevo. ‘But gas is a strange substance. It produces a great deal of soot, which gets everywhere, even between the pages of a closed book.’ By early 1994, he had decided to start work on an electric generator. A racing driver who competed at the national level before the war, Fejzić knew his way around cars and combustion engines, but had little experience with electri city. He joined forces with Jurić Mira, a graduate in electrical engineering he knew from the construction company where they both worked. Although the company’s workshop had been destroyed at the beginning of the siege, they found steel shelving and an electric motor from a universal carpentry machine among the ruins. By coupling a salvaged petrol engine from a Zastava (a car marketed internationally under the brand name Yugo) to the drive shaft of the
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electric motor, they could use it to generate, rather than consume, voltage. The engine itself would run not on petrol, but on natural gas. ‘In theory, it was dangerous,’ says Fejzić. ‘But not in practice.’ The last thing they needed was a water pump to cool the engine. At a part of the Miljacka river sheltered from direct fire, Fejzić spotted a submerged Zastava 750. The water was running high, but Fejzić waded in, reached beneath the surface and worked blind, using the knowledge from his racing days to extract the necessary component. He stood in the current for 30 minutes before he managed to work it free. The generator was designed to create enough electricity for nine families to power one bulb and a fridge. ‘We planned for around 250 watts per flat,’ says Fejzić. That summer, after six months of work, he and Mira switched on the machine for their excited neighbours. It worked perfectly, but two days later it was switched off and has stayed off for 20 years. ‘People were not satisfied,’ explains Fejzić with a shrug. ‘The generator sucked up the whole building’s gas supply. They could only use electricity, but there wasn’t enough electricity to cook. They chose gas.’ Furthermore, the generator’s operation depended on absolute secrecy. Sarajevo’s military police often confiscated such machines for their own use: the generator would need to be hidden, and everyone involved had to be privy to its existence. ‘We were all working as individuals,’ says Fejzić. ‘We weren’t organised. We didn’t agree.’ Perhaps the Sarajevan collective spirit was not up to the ideal standards of the socialist Yugoslavia from which Bosnia emerged, but to anyone brought up in the individualistic society of Western Europe or the USA, the extent of collaboration was remarkable. Self-organising communities were the norm in besieged Sarajevo. On a large scale, entire neighbourhoods of four or five buildings would work together and allocate tasks, but even in small communities, individual roles were mutually understood and respected: on the eighth storey of 11 Kolodvorska Street, for example, Stevan would bring fuel and food for the group while Mustafa constructed their stoves and pans. This instinctive push towards collectivism even influenced the Bosnian army’s improvised
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Building and selling stoves was one of the first and most widespread DIY businesses to develop during the siege. Professional stoves featured locking doors, stable legs and better ventilation for more efficient use of fuel. Photo: James Mollison
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The frequent mortar shelling took a heavy toll on residents. Yet amidst this devastation, Sarajevo witnessed an incredible blooming of cultural pro duction. It is estimated that during the four years of siege Sarajevans produced some 182 theatre events, 170 exhibitions and 48 concerts.
design efforts. In a stapled booklet apparently produced with a Commodore 64 and a dotmatrix printer, the 9th Mountain Brigade of the 4th Koscan Battalion detailed their attempts to turn a captured Serb nationalist armoured car into a tank. Dubbed the T94 in a cheeky nod to the T-series of Soviet battle tanks, the minutes of the 74 meetings they convened to discuss its construction are recorded in their ‘Work Diary’. Here is a typical entry: June 15, 1994 Today we were supposed to pick up and tow the machine for the T94, but couldn’t find a truck. - Šerif says his is broken - Osmo, flat tire - Alijos says his has no gearbox, but he’s lying - Kemo’s engine has overheated - Džemil’s bearing is broken, and that’s actually true Commandant Ešo couldn’t persuade Kasum from Tarčin to do us a favour, so we gave up. From the outset, the defence of Sarajevo was left to a loose collection of militias formed by volunteers according to the street they lived on, their common age, or other unifying, if arbitrary bases. The process of joining them up began in 1993 and never really ended. ‘There were so many funny situations,’ remembers historian Mirsad Zorabdić, then an advisor to Ejup Ganić, the deputy president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. ‘They were self-organised, and everyone had been educated under socialism, so they always
wanted to vote and discuss things. They wouldn’t just follow orders; they would try to make communal decisions.’ In the year leading up to the war, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army systematically confiscated all the weapons from the Sarajevo garrison. When the fighting broke out, the 200 guns kept by guards at the local prison were the only military-grade weapons left in the city, remembers Zorabdić. Another 300 to 400 hunting weapons were added to the Sarajevo arsenal, along with a few illegal pistols. A September 1991 UN embargo stopped supplies of arms to all territories in former Yugoslavia, by which time the Serb nationalists had already been well equipped by the Yugoslav People’s Army. With no chance to buy or import weapons, the Sarajevans were forced to make their own. At least 12 different workshops around Sarajevo devoted themselves to building guns, including the 2nd Government Technical School and a small arts and crafts college. Most of the weapons they made had barrels built from water pipes, with a bolt on a spring that was pulled back and released onto the percussion cap of a shotgun cartridge. Such a gun could be as dangerous for the man firing it as it was for his target; at least one soldier lost his nose when his home-made weapon exploded. Supplied by hunting clubs, shotgun rounds were in plentiful supply at the beginning of the war, but by the end of 1992, the defenders were forced to make ammunition as well. First, cardboard rolled into a cylinder was covered over at one end. Gunpowder was collected from starting
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Hand lamp made from cannibalised bicycle parts and powered by the handle of a coffee grinder. It was built by Vlade Radišić during his service in the 101st brigade of the Bosnian army from 1993 to 1995. Photo: James Mollison
pistols or scraped from individual caps for a child’s cap gun, poured into the tube, tamped down, and covered over with stones and bits of metal. Just before it was fired, each cartridge was primed with a splash of petrol from a bottle or an injection of medical alcohol from a syringe. After ‘pulling the trigger’, up to 30 seconds could pass before the gun fired. ‘The feeling was terrible,’ Zorabdić remembers. The weapon had an effective range of about 10 metres, and its susceptibility to rain gave it its nickname: the ‘umbrella gun’. Other defensive measures employed IEDs made from bent traffic signs, and bombs made from gas bottles, the latter intended to topple buildings onto Serb nationalist tanks. (It was in 1998, two years after the war, that these bombs were remembered and removed. ‘People were too busy eating,’ says Zorabdić.) Until a tunnel finished in July 1993 allowed AK-47s to be smuggled into the city, one weapon would be shared by three or four soldiers on the front line. Some even carried disabled Austro-Hungarian rifles from the Historical Museum just to give
the impression that they were armed. ‘A gun was a gun,’ says Zorabdić. ‘Their role was more psychological than practical.’ Be that as it may, they were no less crucial in the defence of Sarajevo. ‘Drive them crazy,’ Mladić had ordered, and by refusing to let that happen, by preserving their dignity and maintaining a memory of normal life, the Sarajevans fought back. This psychological resistance, as much as the physical need for weapons, water, power, fuel and food, was a constant driving force behind Sarajevo’s improvised design culture. When people swapped recipes for coffee made from lentils, honey made from dandelions, or ‘war mayonnaise’ made from powdered milk and citric acid, they were constructing an image of themselves that refuted the horror around them. In this essential project, humanitarian aid could be perversely unhelpful. Until 1992, Sarajevans had enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that in Western Europe. Tins of inedible ICAR meat from the EU and high-protein biscuits from the USA—fresh from cans with a
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In the extreme circumstances of war, people’s instinctive reaction was to make something out of nothing, using the waste and dysfunctional machines to make improvised stoves, weapons, water collectors, lights, any thing that would help their survival.
1968 expiry date—proved difficult to swallow. Having no choice but to eat it only made things worse. Productivity was a way to alleviate charity’s demeaning effects: Jekte Maršić, then in her eighties, made soap for her entire street with used cooking fat thrown out of the UN peacekeepers’ kitchen. It was greasy, and using it meant scraping leftover fat from your hands afterwards, but people chose to believe that it was good for disinfection. It made them feel clean. In 1996, as suddenly as it had begun, the siege came to an end. ‘During the war we said all the time that when it finished, we wouldn’t think about material things,’ says Hadžismajlović’s wife Habiba. ‘That we would travel, do things differently. But people went straight back to their normal lives. They forgot everything and threw themselves into having the best furniture, a weekend house, and the nicest car.’ Her
Left: Improvised guns were among the only weapons available to Sarajevans in the first year of the war. They were produced from scrap by at least 12 machine shops in the city, including what had been the 2nd Government Technical School and a small art college. Photo: James Mollison
husband also feels a strange nostalgia: ‘People were never better than they were then. If someone invented something he would share it.’ ‘For four years people were living in abnormal circumstances,’ says Elma Hašimbegović, director of the Historical Museum. ‘And when the war was over, they got rid of anything that reminded them of it. They took the plastic sheets from the windows and put in real glass, and they threw out everything they had used.’ Nonetheless, hundreds of stoves, ovens, guns and other handmade items survived. Now exhibited in the Historical Museum, they stand witness to a generation who, Hašimbegović says, ‘will talk about the war until the end of their lives.’ And when they talk, she adds, they don’t discuss ‘nationalism, the fighting or the destruction’, so much as swap ‘stories of improvisation’ about the things they made to survive. ☐
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BRANDING THE WORLD’S NEWEST COUNTRY
Top: Declaring his identity as a citizen of a new nation, a man celebrates the birth of South Sudan with its flag painted on his face. Photo: Paul Banks, United Nations
Right: South Sudanese children rehearse a dance routine to be performed at half-time during South Sudan’s national football team’s match with Kenya as part of the Independence Day celebrations. Photo: Paul Banks, United Nations
South Sudan’s Independence Day was set for only six months after the referendum that established the new country’s independence from Sudan. In that short time state symbols had to be proposed, refined, adopted and promulgated to a country still torn by internal conflict.
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Anne Quito is a design writer and art director based in New York City. She developed an MFA thesis on the nation brandings of South Sudan and Switzerland. The experience of living and working in such cultural melting pots as New York and Washington, DC inspires her ongoing fascination with the intersection of design, politics and identity.
Sometimes the walls of a house are erected before the ground within is fully levelled. In many ways South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, is like a rough foundation dig surrounded by gilded cement walls. The symbols and semblance of nationhood exist: a flag, coat of arms, banknotes, a cultural complex, even a national beer. The visual marks of its national identity in place, it presents itself as a complete, if fledgling, country, a legitimate start-up nation able to fly its unique flag among the 192 others in the United Nations General Assembly. But as the ongoing civil war attests, the state of South Sudan is still disputed within its borders, divided along political and tribal lines into hostile factions. As a nation and as a concept, its citadel is erected on marshlands. The referendum that set South Sudan on the road to statehood was itself a demonstration of the importance—and the challenge—of choosing meaningful symbols. To ensure the widest possible participation in a region with a 27% literacy rate (according to UNESCO, the lowest in the world), the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission decided to use pictures to represent votes for separation from or continued unity with Sudan. But selecting symbols that would be readily understood across Southern Sudan’s more than 60 diverse tribal groups proved difficult, and the choice of two clasped hands to signify unity and an open palm to signify independence was the subject of much controversy. Still, the referendum resulted in a 98.83% affirmative vote for independence from Sudan, ending decades of civil war against the north.
With the official declaration of independence set for July 9th, its officials had less than six months to gestate a nation and its symbols. The flag at least was easy. The six-colour design is a carryover from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). The red, green and black stripes signify their pan-Arabic roots, while the blue pennant symbolises the waters of the Nile, and the yellow star a guiding light. Though proposals for new flag designs were considered, keeping the SPLM flag was a sentimental and strategic decision. After all, it was under that banner that the people of Southern Sudan had gathered and fought during the two civil wars. Designing the coat of arms, South Sudan’s single new post-referendum marker of national identity, proved to be more challenging. The tradition of using heraldic coats of arms dates back to 13th-century England, and their primary purpose was to identify combatants whose identities were concealed behind metal helmets. Then, it was imperative that graphic elements be distinct enough to be read clearly in the fury of battle, but during an age when handto-hand combat is no longer the primary means of engagement, the need for uniqueness is less urgent. These days the coat of arms serves as a validating seal for a state’s passports and other official documents, conferring official status and legitimacy to places, papers and people. With South Sudan’s global launch set in stone, the project deadline could not be negotiated, but the seal’s graphic design had to be fully vetted. The final design consists of an eagle and a shield over a spade and a spear. ‘It’s a fish eagle,’
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An officer checks a voter’s identity at the referendum on South Sudan’s independence at El Fasher polling centre, North Darfur. Ravaged by over 20 years of civil war, South Sudan was left
impoverished. The literacy rate for people aged 15 and older is only 27%, the lowest rate of all countries that gather such data. Photo: Olivier Chassot, United Nations
explains Hakim, a graphic artist and project manager at Juba County Printing Press. He was a member of the technical committee handpicked by the Minister of Culture to propose, refine and finalise the state emblem. Hakim works in a cavernous warehouse with a full suite of Heidelberg printing equipment, all of it broken, he explains, apologising for the darkness. The 40-something veteran pressman wears a simple white button-up adorned only with a commemorative pin bearing the South Sudanese coat of arms. He wears it daily, he says, touching the pin on the pocket just below his heart. ‘The fish eagle is powerful. It can pick up a small crocodile with its claws. It has great vision and can see from afar,’ Hakim says, taking it
off for closer inspection. The choice of motif is intriguing: a bird of prey often mistaken for a raptor, the fish eagle is a kleptoparasite that feeds by stealing food from other birds. When probed about its symbolism, Hakim ignores the question. What of the fact that the fish eagle is actually Zambia’s national bird and is also used in its seal as well as in Namibia’s? Did they consider other animals for the emblem? Other motifs? What about the bull on the billboards advertising White Bull Beer: The Taste of a New Nation? What about other motifs? After all, they were designing for the world’s newest country and they could have picked anything. ‘This was what the majority liked. Ultimately, the vice president
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The coat of arms of the Republic of South Sudan was adopted in July 2011. The design consists of an African fish eagle standing against a shield and a spear. According to the official descrip-
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tion, the eagle signifies ‘vision, strength, resilience and majesty’. The eagle as a symbol of Arab nationalism is also used in the state emblems of other countries, including the Republic of Sudan, from
decided. And that beer is from South Africa, not South Sudan,’ he replies. Hakim explains that the most debated design element was not the eagle but the shield. As a nation comprised of ten states with more than 60 tribal groups, the design on the shield could not resemble any markings from any one tribe too closely. The challenge was to find a pattern that was neutral yet meaningful, an inclusive and unifying symbol for all. Huddled around a computer running CorelDraw, the nine-member committee bonded during long nights away from their families, turning around the successive versions of the design as rapidly as possible. In every round, all 28 cabinet ministers were required to comment, essentially to function as art directors, making consensus an elusive goal. ‘Drop the wings… turn the head to the left…’. Still, after weeks of debate, the National Legislative Assembly ratified the final design in June, barely four weeks before Independence Day. There was no time to celebrate. Official documents, medals, passports, letterheads, business cards, signage and a long list of communication materials had to be prepared before
which South Sudan separated. From left to right: South Sudan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Syria, the interim Syrian government, Yemen and the United States of America.
the Independence Day celebration. Hakim’s cocommittee member, Stanislau Tombe, a graphic designer at the national printing office who was in charge of finalising the design for the passport, shared that in their haste to meet the deadlines, the coat of arms on the cover of the initial run of the South Sudan passport was actually the penultimate version and not the final one, but nobody was looking too closely. They were ready by the deadline, and that was good enough. From an outsider’s point of view, there is nothing remarkable about the design of the South Sudan coat of arms. It is formulaic, a non-design design, its eagle-shield-cartouche combination so commonplace that it looks ready-made, the graphic design equivalent of an instant meal: just add flag. For a population so determined to separate itself from the north, South Sudan chose a design that is essentially a reinterpretation of the Sudanese coat of arms. The eagle has a softer, friendlier expression, its wings fanning around its body in a pleasing pattern, almost like something from a comic book. In contrast, Sudan’s state emblem, bearing the words ‘Victory is
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Top: Stanislaus Tombe Felix, a graphic designer at Juba County Printing Press, finalising the new state emblem. The emblem was selected from the 26 received entries, including a submission from the artistically inclined minister of health (whose design was not selected). Chol Anei Ayii took first place and later sued the government for defaulting on the US$5,000 (€3,918) cash prize. Photo: Anne Quito Right: Commemorative pin bearing the South Sudanese coat of arms. According to Hakim, the graphic artist at the government printing press, the central shield was the most debated design element. South Sudan is a nation comprised of ten states with more than 60 tribal groups, and so the design on the shield could not resemble any markings from any one tribe too closely. Photo: Anne Quito
Ours’, is all business. It features a secretary bird with a severe expression bearing a shield from their 19th-century ruler Muhammad Ahmad. With the bird’s outstretched wings forming a forbidding X, it is a symbol not to be crossed. In comparison South Sudan appears to be the protagonist, perhaps even the young, naïve underdog that gets the audience’s sympathy. When asked if he likes the final design of the emblem. Hakim smiles widely, deftly slipping the pin back onto his shirt pocket. ‘I’m very proud to have been part of the process. It’s a story I can tell my grandchildren,’ he replies, welling up with emotion. Perhaps by the time Hakim’s grandchildren are old enough to appreciate the story there will be ATMs in Juba, or at least ATMs that are easy to find, but for now, according to locals, the black market moneychangers are the quickest and easiest way to get local currency. They can be found hanging around the marketplace and prefer clean, crisp hundred-dollar notes. After haggling over the exchange rate (typically US$0.20 or €0.15 to the South Sudanese pound) they hand over a random assortment of dirty
bills, all of which, regardless of denomination, feature the face of Dr John Garang, the enigmatic US-educated politician and former leader of the SPLA. Garang’s untimely death in a 2005 helicopter crash was mourned by the entire nation, and he was quickly raised to the status of South Sudan’s singular and uncontested national hero. The reverse sides of the banknotes feature symbols of wealth such as cattle, ostriches, lions or the Nile River, but Garang is the dominant figure in the entire series. Like the coat of arms, the currency had to go from design to circulation in only six months. When the first shipment of banknotes arrived, flown into the country in ‘planeloads of cash’, as their finance minister described it, they bore the signature of Elijah Malok, acting governor of South Sudan’s central bank, in spite of the fact that he had not yet been officially appointed at the time the notes went to print (and was replaced shortly thereafter). Far more seriously, the banknotes were missing dates of issue, critical for identifying defects and counterfeit bills. With much fanfare, however, the new suite of banknotes was launched and put into circulation
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The South Sudanese pound features the image of the late John Garang, the deceased leader of South Sudan’s independence movement. The currency
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was designed and printed by De La Rue Currency, a British security printing firm that has been involved in the design or production of over 150 national
just nine days after the Independence Day declaration, despite its flaws. The officials were so pleased with how they turned out that three months later, they printed a series of smallerdenomination bills called piasters, acting on the perceived need for low-value bills to break up the 1-pound note. The piaster design echoed the original set of notes so closely that ultimately the piasters proved too confusing to be traded, especially for a constituency where only one in three people can read. These low-value notes were printed but never put to use, their circulation limited to collectors on eBay. This is not, however, the only currency design project to take place in the new country. When civil war erupted in the capital city in December of 2013 it set ousted vice president Riek Machar against president Salva Kiir. The following March, Machar, who had been in charge of developing South Sudan’s state symbols, issued his own banknotes to be used in rebel-occupied territories. He is also reported to be designing a new state flag and redrawing the South Sudanese map to represent new territorial divisions.
currencies. Planeloads of the South Sudan pound arrived in the capital, Juba, on July 13, 2011.
In such a state of political unrest and armed conflict, at a time when paved roads, an effective education system and safe drinking water are sorely lacking, it may seem preposterous, even irresponsible, to contemplate the construction of a national archive. But former undersecretary at the Ministry of Culture Jok Madut Jok, one of South Sudan’s most vocal cultural champions, speaks about the pragmatic imperative of building cultural institutions during a state’s nascency. In an address to UNESCO, he emphasised the urgency of forging ‘a collective national identity, so that the citizens are able to see their citizenship in the nation as more important than ethnic nationalities. […] It is important to view cultural diversity as an asset that must be put to use for building a nation.’ He argued that it ought to share priority with matters such as education, health, and governance because it dealt with the most critical agenda: forging a sense of kinship and peace within the diverse land. The National Archives, originally set to open in 2015, was a birthday gift (or push present) from the people of Norway on the occasion of South Sudan’s independence. The building is
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When completed, South Sudan’s national archives will organise and conserve historical documents from as far back as 1901. These records tracing the development of the region’s wars, borders and governments have been variously stored in sheds, school basements and USAID tents. Photo: Nikki Kindersley
part of a planned cultural complex in Juba that will include a museum and theatre as well as facilities for the storage and digitalisation of records dating back to the colonial era (and which were kept for years in a tent). The winning design by the Portuguese architecture firm Sitios e Formas and its local partner Beny Design is intended to reflect the African habit of gathering under the canopy of a generous leafy tree to socialise and to find respite from the heat of the day. It features a flat circular roof that shades and connects several smaller buildings. Like the design of the coat of arms, the primary motif is derivative. The tree metaphor executed in the stilt-and-canopy can be seen in the design of the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center, the Qatar Science and Technology Park, or Zaha Hadid’s apartment complex in Vienna, to name a few. Elke Selter, an archive specialist for the United Nations Office for Project Service, which oversees any type of infrastructure building and construction in South Sudan, was the coordinator for the selection process that led to the design of the Archive. When asked if she likes the winning design, she says, ‘It’s good, but
I think there were opportunities for innovation that were missed. “Developing-world architecture” has no architect; the engineer is in charge and he works from a master plan. When else do you get the opportunity to get to design from scratch?’ In spite of the evident pride in their new national identity, finding a locally made souvenir in South Sudan is not as easy as might be imagined, but JIT (Just-in-Time), a local supermarket owned by a friendly Indian man, seemed promising. His store was simple but fully stocked, a veritable paradise of convenience goods mostly imported from Uganda or Kenya, including an impressive array of aerosol mosquito sprays in a wide variety of scents. When asked if he had anything ‘Made in South Sudan’ the owner paused and shook his head, glancing apologetically at the generic ‘Juba Jungle’ baseball caps and brica-brac manufactured in China. His eyes light up. ‘Actually, yes,’ pointing to the last aisle. ‘You can buy a South Sudan flag. So far that’s the only thing they’ve made here.’ ☐
The Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious festival that rotates among four sites located on four sacred rivers, Haridwar on the Ganges, Ujjain on the Shipra, Nashik on the Godawari and Allahabad at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna. This satellite photo from October 13, 2012 shows the vacant floodplain. A month prior this area was under water; three months later it would welcome millions of pilgrims from all over the world to the largest temporary city on earth. Photo courtesy of Google and DigitalGlobe.
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CONSTRUCTING THE WORLD’S BIGGEST (DISASSEMBLABLE) CITY
The construction of the temporary megacity could start only after the end of the monsoon, when the river had receded to its normal course. Tractors were used to form mud and sand into
flat, level street foundations, which were then covered with a total of 75,000 1 m × 5 m (3.3 ft × 16.4 ft) steel plates to create 156 km (97 mi) of new roads. Photo: Felipe Vera
The 2013 Kumbh Mela in Allahabad was the largest peaceful gathering in human history. An entire city was built for the occasion, but unlike the facilities built for the Olympic Games or other international events, this city was designed to be erected, inhabited and dismantled all in the space of a mere five months.
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Rahul Mehrotra is an architect and educator who divides his time between his practice in India and teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His interest in the subject of Ephemerality extends from his research work on issues related to temporality in Indian cities. Felipe Vera is a Chilean architect and urbanist and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research and design work focuses on advancing the understanding of urban ecologies and social patterns in emerging landscapes.
Every four years millions of Hindus celebrate the Kumbh Mela, the Festival of the Urn. The location rotates among Nashik, Ujjain, Haridwar and Allahabad (Pragaya), four riverside cities where, according to an ancient legend recorded in the Bhagavata Purana, drops of amrit, the sacred nectar of immortality, fell to earth during a supernatural 12-year battle between the Devas and Asuras. When the sun, moon and Jupiter recreate the celestial configuration that witnessed this event, pilgrims gather to bathe in the rivers and gain their spiritual benefits. The four locations are not equally significant. The Kumbh Mela is most sacred and most visited when it is held in Allahabad, as it was in 2013 when more than 100 million people from all walks of life came to bathe in the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers during the 55 days (January 14th to March 10th) of the festival. This would be a marvel of civic planning and logistics even if the festival were held in Allahabad itself, but it is not. Instead, in just eight weeks, a nagri (temporary city) springs up on the riverbanks, on an otherwise uninhabited
floodplain that was under water only a month before the start of construction. On the most important days of the 2013 festival, attendance reached an estimated 30 million people (or roughly the combined populations of Belgium and the Netherlands), so this temporary city had to provide not only lodging and provisions, but an entire infrastructure complete with roads, bridges, sanitation, power grid, hospitals, seven train stations and a police force of over 12,000. In the three weeks after the festival ended, the entire city was disassembled and the plain returned to the rivers, which would flood it again a month later. How does an entire megacity rise, flourish, fade and disappear in just five months? The climatic, logistical and time constraints of the project make meticulous planning a matter of success or failure. Planning for the 2013 festival started in February 2012 and was a cooperative effort between the permanent city of Allahabad, the temporary city of Kumbh Mela, and the state of Uttar Pradesh. By early March of 2012, the construction equipment was being inspected and repaired, much of it
Left: The construction of the temporary city started in November 2012, when the ground was dry enough to be levelled so that roads could be built. The festival began on January 14, 2013, giving organisers just eight weeks to prepare the site. Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, is the largest of the rotating
festivals, happening only once every 144 years under a particular astronomical configuration. This satellite photo is from February 8, 2013, just two days before the most auspicious bathing day of the Maha Kumbh Mela. Photo courtesy of Google and DigitalGlobe.
Estimates of the number of people bathing on February 10, 2013 vary, but the most common estimate is about 30 million, making this event the largest peaceful human gathering on record. In total, an estimated 100 million visitors participated in the Kumbh Mela over its 55 days. Photo: Jiva Gupta
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The site of the Kumbh Mela is a temporary city whose population fluctuates between 3 million inhabitants on regular days and 30 million inhabitants on the festival’s most holy days. Shanghai, the world’s largest permanent city, has a population of about 24 million.
having circulated around the subcontinent, serving other projects and festivals. Supplies and materials were being gathered, contractors and subcontractors hired; everything had to be ready to go once the monsoon season ended and the riverbanks emerged from the water in late October. When the floodwaters receded the Public Works Department of Uttar Pradesh state began construction of the pontoon bridges that spanned the rivers, and which were the most intensively used component of the city’s infrastructure. The 2013 Kumbh Mela required 18 bridges over the Ganges, gigantic constructions resting on a total of 4,202 pipas, floating steel structures 9.75 m (32 ft) long and 2.5 m (8 ft) wide, each weighing nearly five and a half tonnes. Bamboo tripods sunk into the riverbed anchored the bridges, and the pipas, lowered into the water by a specially modified flatbed truck, were spaced about 5 m (16.4 ft) apart from each other. They were connected by steel cables above the waterline and coir rope under water, and after they passed inspection an arrangement of beams and sleepers similar to railway tracks was bolted to them. At the height of the festival each bridge had a crew of 30–35 carrying out regular inspections and repairs to ensure the safety of the multitudes crossing the rivers to get to and from the residential areas. The bridges had to be in place by November when the ground was dry enough to be levelled and stabilised, so that the roads that served the nagri could be built, including roads connecting it to Allahabad on the west and Varanasi on the east, as well as roads that defined the grid of the festival city itself. The ‘permanent’ main streets of the city were laid out according to tradition, their names and alignments the same as in every iteration of the festival. They were built of bitumen in stabilised ground outside the flooding areas, approximately 0.6 m (2 ft) higher than
ground level at the centre and gently graded on both sides to ensure drainage. (Although historically these roads had been rolled using manual labour, for the 2013 Kumbh Mela, they were built using tractors for the first time; still, the estimated 156 km (97 mi) of steel plates laid down them to support the wheels of cars and other vehicles were carried and positioned by hand.) As the main roads took shape, the smaller ‘temporary’ paths that connected them were made of poured sand, a natural material that provides good drainage and that would return to the riverbed during the flooding of the monsoon season. the movement of people and materials, this network of roads established the division of the city into sectors (the 2013 festival had 14, three more than the previous one), and the division of the sectors into a regular grid of smaller residential quarters which were assigned to various religious groups and tourist agencies. It also organised infrastructural elements such as water, electricity and sewerage. By December the city grid was complete and structures began to rise. More ‘permanent’ facilities such as hospitals were built of plywood, while cotton tents served as residences and venues for spiritual meetings. There was no master architect for the nagri, and in fact the festival administration employed no architects at all, so each group was responsible for the construction of the section of the grid that it would inhabit and brought in its own contractors and construction teams. The festival site became a collage of cotton, bamboo, tin, plywood and plastic, materials typical of Indian slums, here converging in a constantly changing texture of materials and styles. By January, a fully functional city capable of supporting millions of residents stood where two months earlier there had been only a muddy plain, and throngs of holy men, teachers, students, tourists and service personnel brought the city to bustling life.
During its 2,000 years of existence the Kumbh Mela has grown to tremendous proportions, and the supporting infrastructure has had to keep pace. For the 2013 festival a crew of 1,700 workers constructed 18 pontoon bridges to accommodate the vast numbers of pedestrians needing to cross the river. The largest bridge covered a 725 m (0.45 mi) span. To optimise traffic flow during peak periods, the bridges become one-way according to demand. Photo: R.M. Nunes
Although many temporary structures built on a grid are marked by a dehumanising conformity, visitors to a Kumbh Mela traverse a lively medley of individual expressions as they pass through the city. Unlike many housing developments, refugee camps or cubicle offices, the festival site consists of regularly shaped but autonomously conceived areas in which each community is authorised to organise its space in the way that most accurately expresses its own identity. Some are more spontaneous, others more systematic. Although the procedures that regulate the allocation and organisation of the spaces are well established, they have never
been explicitly codified in any document; rather the traditions are passed on from participant to participant over the cycles of the festival and modified as needed. The sector that houses the akharas, or sects, is a good example. In accordance with tradition, the area for each sect is organised around an identifying flag, which stands in the centre of its space and is clearly visible from the street. Areas for the tents of the gurus and their followers are distributed around it, with the most prominent gurus located along the path from the main entrance to the flag. The importance of each guru is connected with the number of devotees
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The megacity that sprang up next to Allahabad for the Kumbh Mela was nearly 30 times larger by population than the host city, larger than New York, London and Paris combined. To accommodate the millions of pilgrims, more than 35,000
toilets were installed, 14 temporary hospitals built and 12,461 police officers deployed. The vibrant metropolis was completely dismantled 55 days later. Photo: Jiva Gupta Next page: Photo: Rahul Mehrotra
he attracts, which is manifested in the organisation of space at the Kumbh Mela: locations with prime exposure are given to more prominent gurus, allowing them to gather more potential followers, and when one teacher’s followers become too numerous for the allotted space, a new akhara is created with its own space and flag. The akharas themselves are also arranged within the sector according to their prominence, with Juna Akhara, the biggest and oldest of the sects, occupying a privileged spot. As enormous and complex an organism as the festival site is, it may seem impossibly lowtech in an age when the word ‘infrastructure’
typically denotes a city’s most fixed and durable elements. But it is precisely this approach that enables the nagri to adapt to the needs of its inhabitants over each of its brief incarnations. The modularity of steel plates that can be carried by four men is what allows them to be deployed anywhere a road is required. The simplicity of hand-stitched cotton tents stretched over lightweight bamboo frames enables them to be concatenated into the skeleton of a megacity, whatever shape it may need to take, and in whatever colours and patterns may be desired. Heavy machinery and advanced technology are, for the most part, not required, nor are highly trained
Wherever armed a or natural disasters force the relocation of masses of people, there are opportunities to apply the modular low-tech solutions that provide millions of pilgrims with housing, utilities, transportation and public services during the Kumbh Mela.
About 700,000 tents were erected to house the visitors; they ranged from the simplest makeshift constructs to luxurious heated tents with room service, serving occupants from all corners of the world and all walks of life. Photo: Vadim Kulikov
specialists. It is a strategy that serves not only the Kumbh Mela, but also the whole regional economy, because after the festival ends, the city is dismantled and its components are quickly and effectively recycled or repurposed, with metal and plastic items finding their way either to storage or to other festivals and construction projects. Biodegradable materials such as thatch and bamboo are left to reintegrate with the site, which, nurtured by the floodwaters, serves as valuable agricultural land for the 11 monsoon cycles between festivals. There is much here that could be applied to other non-permanent settlements such as refugee camps or disaster
relief efforts, as well as to future urban design and redesign projects. Still, perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from all this is a sense of humility. Festival participants would say that the Kumbh Mela is ‘about renunciation’, an idea that is embodied in its physical manifestation: no building, no road, no garden is permanent, no matter how carefully planned, arduously constructed or lovingly tended, and the act of creation must necessarily be followed, even complemented, by the act of letting go. The ground claimed from the river is only on loan: from mud it was created and to mud it must return. �
(Disassemblable) City
Top: While the Kumbh Mela is essentially a religious devotional festival, it requires massive secular machinery to ensure the coexistence of visitors. Besides 125 food stores, there are
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several food markets, and many companies use the festival to reach out to rural consumers. Photo: Vineet Diwadkar Bottom: Photo: Rachel Taylor
In 1915 opal gemstones were discovered in Coober Pedy, a small town in a remote area of the South Australian desert, one of the driest places on earth. Since then, Coober Pedy has opened 70 opal fields and is the largest opal mining area in the world. With average summer temperatures of 37째C (100째F), and daily highs of 47째C (117째F), it is not surprising that its residents are experts at finding a piece of shade. The temperature is so harsh that the miners began digging their homes into the hillsides. Photo: Markus Gann
LIVING UNDERGROUND
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The sleepy, underground settlement of Coober Pedy became popular in the 1980s when local residents recognised the tourist appeal of the underground town and built the first underground hotel, turning the extreme climatic conditions into an advantage. Today the city lives as much from tourism as from opal mining.
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What is visible of Coober Pedy is the vast hinterland interrupted only by chimneys, shafts and scattered constructions. Most of the 1,695 permanent residents have chosen to live underground where the temperature remains constant even during the cold desert winters of outback Australia. Photo: Nicholas Jones
Living Underground
One of Coober Pedy’s rare outdoor sports is golf, played in the evenings when the temperature becomes bearable. Here Mijo Markovic tees off at the local golf course, one of the world’s most bizarre. In conditions too arid to support even a single blade of grass, players must carry their own patches of artificial turf to minimise damage to their clubs from the parched, stony ground. Since the climate precludes playing in the sunlight, golfers follow their glow-in-the-dark balls from hole to hole through the desert night. Photo: Torsten Blackwood/AFP
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Opal mining used to be a laborious manual operation, and the early Coober Pedy homes were no bigger than they absolutely needed to be. Today residents dig out spacious residences like this comfortable property belonging to T. Aberta and his wife. When more room is needed it can simply be dug out. With luck, the dig might uncover an opal. Photo: Daniele Mattioli/Anzenberger
Governments have drastically reduced their space exploration programmes, delegating these efforts to private enterprise. Copenhagen Suborbitals and Mars One are only two of the companies striving to prove that they can pick up where nasa left off.
Pete Guest is a journalist who has reported from more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. He is fascinated by how humans create and shape their environments, whether that is in rainforests, deserts, cities—or space.
FROM EARTH TO MARS
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In an era when a trip to the International Space Station costs only about €31.2 million (US$40 million) everybody wants to be an astronaut—and the technological and cultural landscape is ready for them to try.
Refshalevej is a jumble of rusted jetties and shipping containers on a windblown peninsula that juts out into the Baltic Sea. Hemmed in on one side by a line of wind turbines and on the other by steaming cooling towers, it surrounds a giant, battered hangar, a remnant of one of Denmark’s abandoned shipyards. Fishermen cast lines off the decaying dock gates; an abandoned toilet stall squats in a lay-by overlooking the sea. Incongruous in the loading yard, a scaffold holds a thin white missile around 10 m (33 ft) tall. It looks for all the world like a cargo cult parody of Cape Canaveral. ‘The tower used to be a prop for Robin Hood,’ says Mads Wilson as he picks his way through a small warehouse filled with pieces of engine, gutted electronics and discarded rolls of wire. ‘We got it from the Danish National Theatre.’ In his day job Wilson manages the software that ‘uses people’s web data against them’ for direct marketing. In his spare time he works here on rocket electronics. Professional mechanics also give up their evenings and weekends to perfect the complex welding work on the fuel tanks. On its next test launch, the cool hand on the rocket’s ‘kill switch’ will belong to an anaesthesiologist. This is Copenhagen Suborbitals, which since its creation in 2008 has become one of the most
sophisticated amateur rocket clubs in the world, dedicated to the belief that part-timers can put a man into space and bring him back alive in a capsule that uses safety floats made out of Pilates balls inflated by Sodastream machines. The pilot will actually be just a passenger; there will be no controls. ‘We have a long line of volunteers. That’s no problem at all,’ Wilson says. ‘The guy in the rocket will know it was built by his best friends.’ The rocket itself is an amalgam of reverse engineering and declassified technology from the American and Soviet space programmes, some of it from the 1950s and 60s, some of it essentially the same propulsion mechanisms used by German rocketeers during the Second World War. The liquid helium canisters used to cool the rocket are labelled ‘balloon gas’. It’s far from pretty, but Wilson insists it will work. ‘Our goal is always to find the simplest solution. There’s nothing on the rockets themselves that you can’t buy in a hardware store. They’re all industrial components,’ Wilson says. ‘A lot of it is ordinary plumbing that you would use in your bathroom.’ More than 1,000 donors contribute the 100,000 Danish kroner (€13,400 or US$17,100) per month it takes to keep the rocket workshop running. The rocket on the test stand represents
Previous spread: A landscape captured by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This photo was colour-enhanced by NASA to bring out surface details and include imaging from beyond the visible spectrum. Image courtesy of NASA/JPLCaltech/Cornell University/Arizona State University.
Right: Based on Russian designs from the early days of the space race, Copenhagen Suborbitals’ lander is rudimentary, but there has been no shortage of volunteers to ride in it. Photo: Pete Guest
From Earth To Mars
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In an old shipyard on the edge of the Danish capital, Copenhagen Suborbitals prepares another rocket test on a scaffold salvaged from a Danish National Theatre production of Robin Hood. Much of the equipment meant to take an amateur into space has been begged, borrowed and repurposed. Photos: Pete Guest
From Earth To Mars
an investment of around 200,000 kroner (€26,900 or US$34,200). ‘We want to prove that we can do this just by being us. Just because we want to,’ Wilson says. ‘Of course, it would go a lot faster with more money, but it’s fun to make do with what we have.’ What they have includes computational power that was unimaginable at the beginning of the space era. The very existence of these privately backed space exploration projects is made possible by processors and components that are becoming steadily faster, smaller and more accessible. Copenhagen Suborbitals’ avionics will include accelerometers based on those found in most smartphones. The market leader in cheap satellite technology, Surrey Satellites, located in a sleepy research park in southern England, has also used commercially available mobile phone parts to keep its costs down. The technology alone, however, doesn’t account for the sudden proliferation of privately funded space projects. Nor would the sudden availability of US government money following the privatisation of nasa’s procurement, if not for the resurgence in the romantic ideal of the inventor-industrialist. A new generation of makers is replacing the passive consumers of the Baby Boomer and Generation X eras. Kickstarter campaigns have funded everything from hi-fi hardware to genetically modified glowing plants. If you can dream it, the new cultural orthodoxy says, the technology will not get in the way. The mad junkyard in a Copenhagen dock may represent a milestone in the democratisation of space travel, but if there is an archetype of this generation’s approach, it is Bas Lansdorp’s Mars One. In 2011 Lansdorp, a Dutch engineer and entrepreneur, sold the wind power company he had founded just three years previously, and declared that he would send a manned mission to Mars by 2023. Mars One, the initiative he launched at press conferences in Shanghai and New York, took a distinctly modern approach to the new space race, beginning without proprietary technology and with a mere fraction of the financial resources of the Silicon Valley rocketeers. The announcement was, quite simply, that Mars One was sending its own astronauts, and that anybody could apply. The funding for the
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project would come, the company said, from the sales of global television rights. A reality TV show concocted around the lives of the wannabe astronauts as they competed to join a crew to Mars would be an unprecedented media event. The lives of the colonists and the aspirations of a generation to join them in space could be packaged for advertisers. More than 200,000 people applied, posting online videos that ranged from the heartfelt to the ridiculous. Just over 1,000 made the first cut. It is a project so seemingly absurd that even some of its supporters and applicants admitted that at the beginning they worried that it was all an elaborate hoax. Regardless, it made headlines around the world. The practicalities barely seemed to matter, although an increasingly impressive advisory board featuring experts from mainstream aerospace research has lent credibility to the project. Not everyone is on board. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment, a religious rule-making body of the United Arab Emirates, has declared that the one-way trip is so dangerous that it is equivalent to suicide. They issued a fatwa declaring it to be un-Islamic and urged Muslims not to sign up. Some from the scientific mainstream, however, are supportive. Professor Morten Bo Madsen, who has worked extensively with nasa and the European Space Agency on Mars missions since the 1997 Pathfinder probe, says the ‘pay-per-view’ mission is ambitious, but ultimately laudable. ‘It’s a couple of guys who lost patience with the public way of doing stuff. They wanted to kick some speed into going to Mars,’ he says. Bo Madsen’s office at the Niels Bohr Institute, in a suburb on the opposite edge of Copenhagen, is a gallery of rover diagrams, Mars globes and newspaper clippings from a decade’s worth of projects. His team specialises in designing magnetic experiments for Mars missions, and over the past two decades he has come to appreciate how little room there is for error in space, particularly in Mars exploration. The past few generations of Mars programmes have made huge discoveries about the planet’s geology and discovered water, but hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost in missions that have failed en route, in orbit, or once on the
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Top: Mars One is working with Lockheed Martin to develop a robotic lander spacecraft. The lander is based on the Phoenix spacecraft developed for NASA’s successful 2007 mission. Artist’s rendering courtesy of Bryan Versteeg/Mars One.
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Bottom: Mars One plans to land all components for its permanent human settlement by 2021. The hardware includes two living units, two life-support units to generate energy, water and breathable air from Martian resources, a cargo supply unit and two rovers. Artist’s rendering courtesy of Bryan Versteeg/ Mars One.
From Earth To Mars
planet. The expected lifespan of a Mars rover, Bo Madsen says, is 90 days. Bo Madsen lists the tiny errors—software malfunctions, badly adjusted mirrors, memory card failures—that have derailed missions, punctuating each example with a wry laugh. Delays are almost inevitable. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, two years behind schedule. ESA’s flagship Martian probe, ExoMars, was set for launch in 2009, but won’t be ready until 2018 at the earliest. Furthermore, there are narrow windows in which missions can be launched, windows during which Earth and Mars are closest to each other. They occur only once every 26 months; miss one, and another will not come around for more than two years. However, Bo Madsen notes, Mars exploration to date has also been a story of making it up as you go along. Tools fitted to the rovers—spectrometers, cameras, drills and scrapers—have often been repurposed remotely. The operations of multimillion-dollar space programmes are at times not too far away from the improvisation of Copenhagen Suborbitals. Mars One has moved forward since the fanfare of its launch. It has signed memoranda of understanding with major aerospace companies, including Lockheed Martin and Paragon Space Development Corp. It issues a steady stream of press releases announcing new advisors and partners, and in June it signed up with Darlow Smithson Productions, a subsidiary of Endemol, the Dutch production company behind the Big Brother brand. In March 2014, Mars One announced that the man who would lead its habitat programme, taking responsibility for the survival and wellbeing of the amateur astronauts, would be Kristian Von Bengtson, one of Copenhagen Suborbitals’ cofounders, who quit in February after falling out with his fellow engineer Peter Madsen. Madsen too has since left to pursue his own projects from a small corrugated iron hangar immediately opposite Copenhagen Suborbitals’ facility. Von Bengtson met Lansdorp when both were consultants for the European Space Agency in 2005. ‘When I was looking for something new and interesting in space and capsules it was natural for me to call Bas. This is what I do, work space missions with an edge and a vision.
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Mars One has all that,’ Von Bengtson says. He is quick to point out that Mars One’s safety features will be considerably more sophisticated than Pilates balls and Sodastream machines. ‘The only similarities […] between the two projects are the dedication and the belief that private [enterprise] will lead us all into a new era of spaceflight for everyone,’ he says. ‘Copenhagen Suborbitals was all about building your access to space, building your own rocket with your own hands.’ But Mars, Von Bengtson says, is no place for amateur designers. Mars enthusiasts have set up a number of ‘analogues’, environments meant to simulate conditions on the Red Planet. The Mars Society, Robert Zubrin’s advocacy organisation, has constructed one in the desert in Utah. A second, planned for Iceland’s Arctic north, was damaged in transit and never deployed. None comes close to providing the true experience. Not only does Mars feature brutal sub-zero temperatures all year round and a permanent desert environment without liquid water, it is also racked by dust storms and volcanic activity. Worse still, without Earth’s protective atmosphere, radiation levels are hazardously high. A Martian habitat would need to be weather-sealed, radiation-shielded and totally airtight, while also being portable enough to ship on the eight-month voyage. The Curiosity mission delivered a payload of 900 kg (2,000 lb). Mars One will need to ship several times that. Von Bengtson believes that the technology to keep the astronauts alive already exists. Radiation shielding could be achieved by burying the habitat under dust or ice, he explains. ‘Obviously there are a lot of technical requirements related to having an outpost on Mars, such as pressurisation, air-lock design, dust prevention and life support systems,’ he says. ‘But Mars One is based on existing technology, so no Nobel prizes are needed for us to do our work.’ Technology is only half of the battle. The prospective colonists are signing up for a lifetime on Mars, and their habitat has to be more than simply functional. ‘The biggest challenge is creating an outpost where people can live their entire lives. The outpost has to support every aspect of a human life and group living as well. The interior design has to be very flexible and will be evaluated while training is taking place
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In the past decade, private space programmes have become the must-have accessory of the post-dotcom Silicon Valley set. Billionaire PayPal founder Elon Musk has SpaceX, while Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is the keystone investor in Blue Origin, which hopes to compete for the same business. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was among the early investors in Space Adventures, a space tourism venture.
to optimise the design and performance of the architecture,’ Von Bengtson says. ‘It’s relatively “easy” to get technology working, but humans are much more complex.’ In interviews, most applicants to Mars One demonstrate a startlingly blasé approach to their impending deaths on a distant planet, but a straw poll shows that the most common worry is simple boredom: what they are going to do all day. Among them, though, there is one applicant who is uniquely qualified to speak about the total isolation and constant danger of extreme and remote living conditions: Dr Robert Schwartz, a physicist who has spent ten winters in the Antarctic, working for eight months at a time in a habitat cut off from the outside world. ‘It’s not such a bad gig if you think about it,’ Schwartz says on a crackling satellite phone line from Antarctica. ‘I’d rather do that than writing papers or anything like that, like most of my colleagues have to do.’ Working in an Antarctic winter without so much as a supply plane and with only intermittent satellite communications with home is a challenge requiring constant improvisation and innovation. The infrastructure on the base is being rebuilt, but the old facilities have been continuously jerry-rigged to keep them functioning and liveable. Newer habitats, while they might be more efficient, are often designed without direct experience of the extreme conditions that they will face, according to Schwartz. ‘When I got down there the first time the station was 22 years old. Nobody said anything if you remodelled your room,’ he says. ‘We got the buildings
we wanted because we did it ourselves… you know out of experience what you want.’ Schwartz signed up to Mars One after failing to make the final cut to be an astronaut. He was in the last 2% of applicants to ESA, and missed out at the last hurdle. His job has taught him enough about isolation to harden him to the harsh realities of a one-way trip to Mars. ‘When I come to the Antarctic I know I will return again, back to the green world. We definitely give up things that seemed normal to us,’ he says. ‘You return to New Zealand [the staging point for the Antarctic station], and you come out and you smell grass again. After your first year you reach down and touch the grass. There are small things that you absolutely took for granted and you appreciate more again. There are things you miss, but every year you adapt more to it. You think you are going to miss things… but you realise that though they would be nice to have, you can live without them.’ He is fatalistic about his chances. Given the radiation, cancer is a near certainty, he says. The mission is hugely complex, fraught with risk and ending in a lonely death. ‘Mars would be for humankind, and for me personally, an absolute adventure. In 15 to 20 years, I would be of an age where I could live a few more years on Mars and maybe go out with a bang, rather than end up in a retirement home with Alzheimer’s,’ he says. ‘Of course, we have much more stuff [in Antarctica] than we would have on Mars. You would have to improvise more.’ He pauses. ‘I know what I’m getting into.’ ☐
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CULTURGEST Lisboa 31 October 2014 — 15 March 2015
Honey, I rearranged the collection... by artist Posters from the Lempert Collection (Chapter 1 / Part 1)
This is the first in a series of exhibitions dedicated to exhibition posters and artist's posters. In the first chapter, which will be completed with a second exhibition held immediately after this one, various artists who have devoted special attention to this medium are highlighted. In the second chapter, the posters will be selected and arranged according to a classificatory system. Finally, in the third and last chapter, the posters will be arranged in chronological order. This series of exhibitions will take place at different intervals until late 2018.
Jean Dubuffet, Claes Oldenburg, Ben Vautier, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Dieter Roth, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, James Lee Byars and Gino de Dominicis
Rua Arco do Cego, 50 1000-300 Lisboa T +351 21 790 54 54 culturgest@cgd.pt www.culturgest.pt
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