International student expresses benefits of building design

Senior Yuteng (Mars) Hou is a Chinese international student at Fresno Christian Schools, one of many participants in the AmeriStudent program. 

As the world progresses in technology, social normalcy and living standards, architecture mirrors the evolution of history. Architecture improves lives, reflects social change and has great importance in each era. It represents the changes experienced in history and the past’s influence on the people.

While high school students busy themselves with daily assignments, many resist creating a vision for their future. There are infinite ways to develop a passion that not only drives next steps, but uses a student’s interests and abilities. Students can not only make a name for themselves, but also serve their own and far-reaching communities.

Every building system in the world slowly evolves in accordance with peoples’ needs. Whether they are extravagant homes or disadvantaged slums, the local peoples’ living habits are different as well as the main development of the building system.

Architects can provide professional analysis to meet the needs of local people and create a framework that best suits them, while using architecture to improve people’s lives.

The house that ordinary people care about will also change according to the change of the times. When a person doesn’t even have enough money to solve the problem of food and clothing, he only thinks of a roof over his head and shelter from rain and wind.

For example, the country of Nigeria is home to a famous slum: Makoko. It is made up of many refugees or low-income people on a floating island. The village is isolated on the ocean without solid houses and no roads. People construct homes with garbage or broken boats on the sea.

Nearly 200,000 people are on the island made up of scrap and garbage. With five to ten people in each home, the island lacks sanitation, sewage, proper garbage and waste disposal and healthy living situations. There is no opportunity for children to go to school and their education level gradually falls behind.

Illegal buildings in Makoko in 2012 added to the environmental damage in the village. The government planned to forcibly demolish these houses and 200,000 people would have nowhere to dwell.

Kunlé Adeyemi was born in Kaduna, the state capital of Kaduna State in north-western Nigeria. He gave up his work and journeyed to Makoko with his knowledge, expertise and research in architecture. 

His passion was to change the living environment of the people in Makoko and save their social status. Adeyemi decided to help the children by building a school which is a solid triangle and is divided into three levels.

He proposed the first floor as a playground of about 100 square meters and the second floor a closed classroom of 50 square meters for children. A stairwell connects the upper and lower floors. He proposed a third floor for the teacher’s office or laboratory. It can also be used as a scenery lookout.

The most amazing thing about this school is that there are a lot of buckets under the first floor and the whole building is made of wood, so this is a school floating on the water. Some might say this is the ‘Venice of Nigeria’. Solar panels are installed on the top floor to provide electricity and collect rainwater into buckets under the house as a clean water source for the school.

Plants can be grown in the middle of the playground and the excrement of the toilet can be connected to the plants as fertilizer through pipes. This building design can replace the house most residents live in and allow them to build their own healthy and clean homes.

Adeyemi’s architecture solved the difficulties of 200,000 people in the simplest way. It also changed their way of life in 2013 and allowed children to get a better education. Because Adeyemi’s design government decided to abandon the forced demolition plan and give legal status, I hope that more people can build their own houses according to Adeyemi’s design.

Over their lifetime, many architectural designers, such as Francisco de Arruda, Le Corbusier, Tadao Ando, ​​Zaha Hadid and Frank Lloyd Wright have impacted their communities through their designs. Buildings such as Tadao Ando’s Church of Light, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Taj Mahal and Burj Khalifa all create community pride.

With the progress of society, people’s lives have also undergone tremendous changes. Although at one time houses were simple and people were not so rich, the interaction between people and people was rich; even entire neighborhoods knew each other. 

I don’t think the world is balanced. Some people are born without worrying about basic life, while others face difficulties and poverty all their lives. They can’t get a good education because of the economic level and I hope to play a part in improving their lives.

I hope to be an excellent architectural designer who can teach the less fortunate how to improve their living conditions in difficult situations and utilize the waste to transform them. In this way, they don’t need to think about basic life issues and they can look to the future.

Architecture has become a mirror of the times. To understand this revolutionary practice, read Le Corbusier’s “Towards New Architecture“.

For more articles, read Coronavirus spreads across the globe, public health threatened and COLUMN: Global impact begins at local level.

Mars Hou can be reached via email.