Amid poverty, a few poetic lines

Sometimes an architecture exhibition is simply blessed with good timing. When the work is examined in isolation, it can elicit a yawn. But seen in a broader political context, it triggers a deep emotional response.

“Outreach: Design Ideas for a Mobile HIV/AIDS Health Clinic for Africa,” the current exhibition at the A + D Architecture and Design Museum in downtown Los Angeles, is such a show. The result of a six-month competition, the show was organized by Architecture for Humanity, a New York-based nonprofit design advocacy group, and International Medical Corp., a humanitarian relief organization based in Los Angeles. In all, 65 designs are on view. Of these, four finalists have been chosen to participate in a workshop to develop their projects further. The workshop will be held in South Africa later this year.

As architecture, the show is of limited importance. None of the work breaks new ground. Some of it is decidedly second-rate.

But wittingly or not, the show raises questions that strike at the heart of architecture’s social value. What, ultimately, can architecture do to lessen large-scale human suffering? Where should we invest our creative energy? And at a time when America has devoted so many of its resources to war, is such grass-roots optimism simply naive? These questions haunt the show, and they give it a resonance that reaches far beyond its limited ambitions.

“Outreach” opens with a series of photographs depicting housing conditions in Kibera, Kenya, the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa. In one, rows of decrepit shacks flank a shallow stream. The stream is overflowing with garbage, and the only signs of life are a seated man, his arms limp with exhaustion, and a pig foraging for food. In another photo, three boys huddle in front of a makeshift shelter. The shelter’s walls are a patchwork of corrugated steel, rusted sheet metal and dead branches.

Such images have become cliches of Third World poverty, and they only begin to tell the scope of the tragedy. Of Kibera’s 1 million inhabitants, for example, 20% are infected with HIV or AIDS. The squalor, too, is hard to grasp. There is no fresh water supply, electricity or plumbing.

But there are also moments here that declaim the durability of the human imagination, even in the worst of circumstances. The shelter, for example, is ingeniously patched together. The texture and color of its materials -- framed by a striking blue sky -- have a redeeming beauty. As such, the image hints at architecture’s humanizing potential.

The best projects here reflect that sense of spiritual and psychic endurance. One example is by the Paris-based team of Gaston Tolila and Nicholas Galliland. The design is anchored by two concrete volumes -- modeled on local granaries -- that are intended to house a pharmacy. A large tent-like roof is draped over these forms, its colorful fabric -- made of African textiles -- supported by a grid of slender cables and steel columns.

The design’s practicality is obvious enough. The roof provides shelter from the sun while allowing air to flow through the interiors, cooling them during blistering hot days. The concrete rooms, meanwhile, can be used to safely store medical supplies.

But the project’s strength lies in its ability to give such functional considerations a deeper poetic meaning. The textile roof roots the design in local vernacular culture. By reusing these materials in unexpected ways, however, the architects are able to create a structure that is both radically new and open to myriad interpretations. In one drawing, for example, the structure is transformed into an open-air movie theater, with screen images reflecting off the textile roof in the night sky.

A project by the Los Angeles-based Robert Johnson adopts a similar approach. Johnson’s clinic is housed in a standard 40-foot shipping container. Once it arrives at a site, the container unfolds, its walls sliding open and flipping down so that relief workers can unpack collapsible benches, folding beds and portable labs. White camouflage netting extends out from the container to create an extended shelter, a vision that evokes the world’s most elegant mobile home.

Few of the designs balance aesthetic and practical considerations so effectively. A project by Heide Schuster and Wilfried Hoffman of Dortmund, Germany, for example, includes a mobile truck unit that would house clinic supplies. The truck hooks up to a concrete wall that is intended to give the project a sense of permanence after the mobile clinic moves on to another site. But the wall has no real function, and it lacks interest as an object, so it ends up becoming a somewhat superficial aesthetic gesture.

Most of the work in the exhibition can be roughly divided into two categories: designs that evoke a military aesthetic and variations of an architecture parlant -- designs that use literal representation to evoke the project’s function. Of these, the latter include some whopping misadventures. One design includes a roof shaped like a diaphragm -- a silly allusion to the benefits of birth control that is shocking only due to its lack of humor. Another, more playful, project depicts an enormous balloon in the shape of a condom that would float over the landscape, lifting the clinic from site to site.

By comparison, the projects that evoke military machines touch a more evocative chord. In a project by the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, a pair of mechanized wings unfolds above a mobile steel base, evoking a gigantic carnivorous bird. Several projects depict the clinics as fortified structures, their faceted forms suggesting armor plating.

It is impossible to look at these images without conjuring up the clouds of Apache helicopters and phalanxes of Bradley assault vehicles currently swarming across the Iraqi desert. The aesthetic of those war machines has its own hypnotic quality. Here, however, that language has been co-opted for a more humane purpose. The contrast is striking, and it underlines the fact that good design is morally neutral. It is the individual designer who chooses which master to serve.

Of course, few resources have ever been devoted to the kind of work that this show espouses. The architects who took part in the competition were not paid; there is no guarantee that any of these projects will be built. If Architecture for Humanity is able to raise the funds necessary to build a single prototype of one of the designs, it will be a small miracle.

Under these circumstances, the value of such an architecture show is limited to offering a lens into an alternate reality. It is in that sense, and that sense alone, that the show is an undeniable success.

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‘Outreach’

What: “Outreach: Design Ideas for a Mobile HIV/AIDS Health Clinic for Africa”

Where: A + D Museum, 304 S. Broadway, downtown Los Angeles

When: Daily, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: May 30

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 620-9961