Design for Fragility—13 Stories of Humanitarian Architects

This paper explores the themes of fragility, design, disaster and architecture as explored by the authors new book: Design for Fragility: Thirteen Stories of Humanitarian Architecture. The book profiles thirteen built projects that have transformed the social and economic fabric of the communities’ lives for whom the projects were built and sdesigned with. Design for Fragility sought to go beyond just detailing the architects’ motivations or final design/built form of the project. The aim was to investigate these thirteen diverse projects and innovative design practices to understand what implications they might have for architectural practice at large, through analysing: Design for Fragility builds on Charlesworth’s Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working After Disasters (Routledge 2014), which explored the role for architects in exercising ‘spatial agency’ while designing shelter and settlement projects for communities after disasters. Since that time, the humanitarian architecture movement has expanded globally with the prominence of design agencies including the MASS. Design Group and Architecture Sans Frontières (ASF) International. Supporting the rise of humanitarian architecture has been the emergence of dedicated master’s degrees in the last decade that are training the next generation of design and transdisciplinary professionals to work in the disaster and development sectors. These include the RMIT University Masters of Design, Disaster and Development [MoDDD] in Melbourne, Australia, and the UIC Master of International Cooperation Sustainable Emergency Architecture in Barcelona, Spain.