WHY GUERRILLA DESIGN?
HOW DO WE WORK? “Faced with the general superiority of the enemy, the plan is to find the tactical form of achieving a relative superiority at a selected point, whether it be to concentrate more effectives than the enemy, or to assure an advantage in making use of the terrain, thus upsetting the balance of forces. Under these conditions, a tactical victory is assured.”
“Guerrilla Warfare—A Method”, The Guerrilla Reader, 209
Every summer, the IDC grants students the opportunity to travel to a foreign country and use their talents to analyze and address various needs within impoverished communities. They then team with local craftspeople to construct a work of design that uses these strategies to improve the conditions faced by this community.
The unique pressures of this working environment typically render traditional patterns of design obsolete. Such methods are simply too cumbersome to be of use when working within the rigorous environment provided by humanitarian design. Instead, they must prepare themselves to react to facts and opportunities that have yet to be seen.
To prepare participating students to prosper within this landscape, the IDC gives them the chance to learn this style of design by completing a small project to benefit the local community before departing. In the weeks that follow, the challenges posed by these seemingly simple projects inevitably prompt the students, who are used to more abstract projects (often with practically limitless budgets), to invent a process of design that allows them to move seamlessly between the intangible promise of their research and the physical conditions of the built work.
By the end of these projects, our students have not simply learned new facts, they have created new patterns of knowing. The given, be it established through the leanings of the field, a particular professor, or a sanctioned text, is suddenly placed in a position where it must be interrogated and new hypotheses tested. Rather than become members of an assumed system, they have become a key component in its evolution.
Rather than become soldiers, they have become guerrillas.
WHAT INSPIRES US?
PEOPLE WE ADMIRE
RURAL STUDIO, AUBURN UNIVERSITY
JAE CHA, LIGHT, INC.
CAMERON ST. CLAIR, ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANITYBAREFOOT ARCHITECTS OF TILONA
ONE SMALL PROJECT, WES JANZ
BAREFOOT ARTISTS
DESIGN WORKS
DESIGN CORP
CRUCE’ DESIGN, IDC WEBSITE DESIGN
BOOKS WE READ
DESIGN LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN, Architecture for Humanity
RURAL STUDIO: SAMUEL MOCKBEE AND AN ARCHITECTURE OF DECENCY, Andrea Oppenheimer Dean & Timothy Hursley
STUDIO AT LARGE: ARCHITECTURE IN SERVICE OF GLOBAL COMMUNITIES, Sergio Palleroni with Christiana Eichhbaum Merkelbach
CRADLE TO CRADLE, William McDonough & Michael Braungart
OUT OF SITE: A SOCIAL CRITICISM OF ARCHITECTURE, Diane Ghirardo
THE FAVORED CIRCLE, Garry Stevens
EXPANDING ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AS ACTIVISM
THEORY OF THE DERIVE, G.E. Debord
COLLAGE CITY, Collin Rowe
RADICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS, Lebbeus Woods
THE SAVAGE MIND, Claude Levi-Strauss
INEFFABLE SPACE, Le Corbusier
MAXIMUM CITY, Suketu Mehta
CULTURE JAM, Kalle Lasn
INFORMAL URBANISM: CARACAS, A. Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
INDIA’S RICKSHAWS, Calvin Trillin
THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE, Hakim Bey