Illustrative photo: Anaïs Raimbault, Radio Prague International
Forty percent of global carbon emissions come from the construction industry, and a new exhibition at Prague’s Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning (CAMP), A Lot With Little, features 10 architectural projects from the Global North and South that bring sustainable solutions in housing and building transformations. The designs featured are described as “bold but affordable”, so I asked head curator, Argentinian born architect Noemí Blager, how these two methods go hand in hand.
“Most of the projects in A Lot With Little have been made with smaller budgets, others with more generous budgets. When I talk about doing a lot with little, it’s not necessarily little money, it’s more about the projects having little or no cost in terms of their environmental impact. When we think about the word ‘bold’ here, it describes the nature of the projects. All the architects are very daring, because they don’t care about prejudice.
“For example, in Niamey, the capital of Niger, there is a project that has used compact earth to build housing for middle class people in the city. But society has a prejudice against the materials that were used, because people conceive it as a material for ‘poor people’. The architects had to overcome this prejudice, and build something that responds to the climate conditions of the area, that provides beautiful architectural spaces, without having to use something like concrete, which might be the expectation because it’s what is used in the west, even though it’s wrong for the climate condition of the specific place.
See the rest here.
Author: Amelia Mola-Schmidt