As an aside that I should have blogged about earlier, just before I left London I met up with a friend from Bam, Iran, scene of the previous Boxing Day quake that everyone's forgotten about. Pretty interesting and sad listening to him talk about what's happened there in the context of too much money being pledged to the tsunami effort. Basically, everyone's still in inadequate temporary housing, not much rebuilding has happened and the town's population is moving elsewhere as the pace of change is slow. I don't remember the world's leaders queuing up to outdo each other with 'generosity', or collecting boxes in every village shop, when 25,000 died and 60,000 were made homeless in an 'axis of evil' country. Given Indonesia's supposed Islamic militant links, the double standards and the 'politics of giving' make me, well, uneasy, let's say. When the hysteria has died down, are we allowed to ask why this level of competitive giving can't be diverted to, say, AIDS drugs in Africa or poverty in our own back yards? the good folk of Hale County, Alabama could sure do with seeing a bit of that money invested round here. But then again, given that most of the aid that was promised to Bam never materialised, maybe we should wait and see how much we really end up giving.
A couple of mini rants
This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
Comments