Monday, December 28, 2009

Passage from 2004 Shelter & Beyond Exhibit

The 12th Annual Cascieri Lectureship in the Humanities addresses the broad topic of Shelter. The need for shelter can seem devastatingly impossible to meet. Yet the organizations and professionals working on the problem as represented in this exhibit equally understand human ingenuity is limitless. Instead of being overwhelmed these organizations challenge the barrier of conditioned notions of shelter and architectural practice.


Within the study of architecture, R Buckminster Fuller envisioned the possibility of design informed by innovation. Bucky Fuller was a frequent guest of Dean Cascieri, and in 1966, at the BAC's new facility here on Newbury Street, he spoke of "the encouragement of human beings in the world of design give to others." The projects included in this exhibit overflow with enthusiasm. Space is fused to the people who exercise their problem solving skills, competence, sensitivity, and resourcefulness in relevant artifact making. 


The innovations on display separate into developments in Design, Process, and Service. As much as there is a need for increased units of affordable housing there is a need for a variety of solutions for improving or increasing stable housing. The organizations and work presented in this exhibit are an initial guide to an enormous base of imaginative and viable solutions for housing.


Human beings have a long history of sucess doing more with less. The direction Buckminster Fuller gave throughout his lifetime was "to exercise our option to make it." He believed we were overly constrained by tradition, even though human lives were being transformed by the technological age. Feeling that architects were best equipped to address the undeniable global need for shelter, Bucky simply asked "Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?"

A portion of the exhibit is now hanging at 468 Brock Avenue, New Bedford, MA (see econewbedford.blogspot.com)


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