Design for Good by John Cary
Author:John Cary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00
Aerial view of Mulan Primary School.
Architect Joshua Bolchover, a native of Manchester, England, grew up surrounded by the process of design. “My parents are architects, and they work from home, so my home was literally a living, working office when I was growing up. They were always dealing with problems associated with buildings,” explains Bolchover. “I was fascinated by all the tools that surrounded me—scale rulers, Maylines, and all this kind of stuff.
“I always say that my biggest act of rebellion was actually becoming an architect, because it was something I swore I would not do,” Bolchover continues. “My parents would always say, ‘Whatever you do, do not become an architect.’” They had seen the social ambitions of architecture erode over the years. However, after exploring a career in medicine, Bolchover ultimately decided to pursue architecture, pledging to do it in a very different way from his parents, who had focused mostly on health-care architecture in Manchester.
Bolchover landed in Hong Kong after studying architecture and working in Cambridge, San Francisco, and London. The move to Hong Kong came when Bolchover was living in London, teaching, and doing multiple other things. “I was basically working three jobs, getting paid nothing, and thinking it was amazing,” he explains. “Then we moved to Hong Kong, and I got a job working at the University of Hong Kong in a quite junior role. I remember this moment when they gave me the keys to my office and said, ‘Okay, there you go.’ I asked, ‘Well, what do I have to do?’”
The implication to Bolchover, he tells me, was “‘Just do what you do. Just decide what you do.’ But they didn’t even say that; they didn’t give me any guidance whatsoever. It was a real moment of liberation, and I began wondering, ‘Okay, what am I going to do here?’”
Bolchover soon met architect John Lin, whom we met in chapter 3. Lin was building a school in rural China and invited Bolchover to make the eight-hour car trip with him to visit it. As they talked and observed the transition from their urban lives in Hong Kong to the rural context where Lin was working, the two hatched the beginnings of their practice together, Rural Urban Framework, a research program of the University of Hong Kong.
As work on Lin’s original school project concluded and under the auspices of Rural Urban Framework, Bolchover and Lin reached out to other nongovernmental organizations that they thought might need design assistance. That outreach connected them with a Hong Kong– based NGO called The Power of Love, which for nearly two decades now has been building schools across rural China. Purely by coincidence, it also had a tie to the University of Hong Kong.
The NGO was created by Ivy Lam, a Hong Kong native who was educated in Canada and returned to become an administrator in the Department of Medicine at the university. Grateful for the opportunity she’d had to study, and aware of the limited educational opportunities for most children in rural China, Lam established the NGO in 1998.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Kathy Andrews Collection by Kathy Andrews(10576)
The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro(7591)
Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex(4240)
Paper Towns by Green John(4187)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson(3848)
Be in a Treehouse by Pete Nelson(3244)
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by J.K. Rowling(3111)
Goodbye Paradise(2991)
Never by Ken Follett(2925)
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer(2721)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro(2633)
The Genius of Japanese Carpentry by Azby Brown(2622)
The Cellar by Natasha Preston(2614)
Drawing Shortcuts: Developing Quick Drawing Skills Using Today's Technology by Leggitt Jim(2540)
120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade(2454)
Architecture 101 by Nicole Bridge(2360)
Machine Learning at Scale with H2O by Gregory Keys | David Whiting(2338)
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman(2319)
Industrial Automation from Scratch: A hands-on guide to using sensors, actuators, PLCs, HMIs, and SCADA to automate industrial processes by Olushola Akande(2206)