BY ZACH MORTICE
Mulan Primary School in Huaiji County, Guangdong, China, by Rural Urban Framework and the Power of Love. Photo Courtesy of Rural Urban Framework.
John Cary?s book Design for Good (Island Press, 2017) details a now familiar formulation for do-good design in the developing world: a western architect working closely with local partners, using local materials assembled to respect vernacular traditions and modern aesthetics, employing local labor trained as an act of grassroots economic development.
From the remotest outposts of developing-world privation to the forgotten places much closer to home that exist in the shadow of great wealth, Cary (the former executive director of Public Architecture, the public-impact design nonprofit) advocates on behalf of design for dignity. ?Dignity,? he writes, ?is about knowing your intrinsic worth and seeing that worth reflected in the places you inhabit.? It?s not an aesthetic goal, or a measure of the designer?s saintly ambitions. It?s a quality of the users? experience. The building types he examines are familiar (Rural Urban Framework?s Mulan Primary School, supportive housing by Michael Maltzan for the recently homeless in Los Angeles’s Skid Row) and totally singular to their contexts. There?s MASS Design Group?s cholera treatment center in Haiti made necessary by the region?s devastation from a 2010 earthquake that piled onto what was already the Western Hemisphere?s poorest nation. Also by MASS (Cary?s prototypi...