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UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon today appealed to the international community for one point five billion more dollars in aid to help Haiti recover from last month’s devastating earthquake. With the rainy season approaching, Ban said, the top priority is to provide Haitians with shelter, sanitation and humanitarian assistance. Rebuilding Haiti will likely take years. Designers and architects across the globe want to help. In fact, they’ll be holding an series of brainstorming sessions across the globe tomorrow. The World’s Clark Boyd reports on “Global Pecha Kucha Night for Haiti.”
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DAVID BARON: This morning the first commercial flight into Haiti since last month’s earthquake landed in Port-au-Prince. It’s one small sign of normal life returning. But things still aren’t normal there. Shelter, sanitation and humanitarian aid remain a priority and rebuilding Haiti will likely take years. Designers and architects across the globe want to help with that. In fact, tomorrow, a group of them is holding a series of Haiti brainstorming sessions across the globe. The World’s Clark Boyd reports.
CLARK BOYD: Architecture for Humanity is a San Francisco-based non-profit with a simple slogan: Design Like You Give a Damn. The group provides construction, design and development expertise to places that need it most and right now, Haiti is the major focus. In fact, even before the earthquake, Architecture for Humanity was working with local Haitians on plans to build disaster resistant shelters that could double as youth centers. Then, last month, disaster struck.
CAMERON SINCLAIR: Post earthquake, I must have been getting somewhere between four to seven hundred emails a day from people either wanting to help or who had interesting ideas and the one thing that we know is that architects and engineers have a lot of interesting ideas.
BOYD: Cameron Sinclair is the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity. He started thinking about ways to marshal those ideas and he hit on something.
SINCLAIR: Let’s utilize designers in a way that they know best, which is to talk about their own work. Getting people to stand out, do a show and tell about what they do and do it in a way that’s hopeful.
BOYD: That kind of global show and tell for architects, designers and all matter of creative people, it turns out, already existed. It’s called Pecha Kucha, Japanese for chit chat. Two architects working in Japan came up with the idea. Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham wanted to create regular events where creative people could meet and bounce ideas off of each other. But they didn’t want lectures, just short presentations no more than six and a half minutes or so. The idea caught on. These days, Pecha Kuchas take place in more than 250 cities across the globe. Mark Dytham says that after the Haiti earthquake, organizers wondered whether they could provide help so Dytham and Klein teamed up with Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity. They’ve organized what they’re calling a Global Pecha Kucha Night for Haiti.
SPEAKER: And what we’re asking people to do, see if there’s somebody in your town or your region who’s got experience in this field with you know, experience that relates to the issues at hand in Haiti, could they come forward and do a presentation.
BOYD: In short order, hundreds responded. Starting tomorrow, Pecha Kucha meetings will happen in kind of a rolling wave across the glove, starting in Auckland, New Zealand. Andrew Barrie is an architect at the University of Auckland and the organizer of the city’s Pecha Kucha Night. He says that people there feel a connection to Haiti.
ANDREW BARRIE: New Zealand is on the Pacific Rim of Fire and so it’s been a long time since we’ve had a really major earthquake in New Zealand and so there’s a real strong sense here that it could easily be us next so this feeling of wanting to help is very kind of strong and very palpable here.
BOYD: In Stockholm, Sweden, Pecha Kucha organizer Eva Kumleen has a speaker who will discuss Haiti’s sanitation needs.
EVA KUMLEEN: Toilets, how do you work with these issues when you don’t have it? And this Swedish guy has together with researchers and other companies made an individual toilet which is basically a bag. It’s called Pee Poo bag actually. No smell, no poison, it doesn’t destroy the groundwater.
BOYD: While the focus will be on disaster and recovery, Chicago Pecha Kucha organizer and architect, Peter Exley promises that there will be lighter moments as well.
PETER EXLEY: We do it at a place called Marta’s, it’s a bar and rock n’ roll venue on the north side of Chicago and I have something up my sleeve for this Saturday. It won’t be about architecture though. It could well be about my inability to hold a tune.
BOYD: All of the Pecha Kucha presentations will be streamed live, online as they happen. Pecha Kucha founder Mark Dytham says that all the ideas will be gathered into a database and made available to aid organizations on the ground in Haiti. He hopes that those groups will use some of those ideas and then give feedback to the Pecha Kucha community on what worked and what didn’t. For The World, this is Clark Boyd.
BARON: You can find out where Pecha Kucha meetings are happening near you this weekend at TheWorld.org.
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