Disaster relief and the materiality of aid: humanitarian Iimaginaries and design interventions at Oxfam, 1971-1976
Messell, Tania and Sanchez Moreno, Lilian (2022) Disaster relief and the materiality of aid: humanitarian Iimaginaries and design interventions at Oxfam, 1971-1976. In: Building-object: shared and contested territories of design and architecture. Bloomsbury Press, London, pp. 181-198. ISBN 9781350234024
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Co-authored book chapter in Ashby, C., and Crinson, M., Ed. Building-Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, Bloomsbury Press, London.
The chapter, 'Disaster Relief and the Materiality of Aid: Humanitarian Imaginaries and Design Interventions at Oxfam, 1971-1976', argues that the rationality of Oxfam's shelter, aligned with wider shifts within Western humanitarian circles, when ideological, technical and logistical transformations expanded zones of interventions and aid responses were re-conceived. The project also arose from modernist and counter-cultural experiments in predominantly Western architecture and design circles, where mobility, standardization and vernacular building typologies overlapped. Emerging from these entwined discourses and practices, and spurred by conceptions of ‘distant suffering’, portable, standardised and easily reproducible approaches to housing became envisioned as a possible response to post-conflict and natural disasters in so-called developing countries. As such, the chapter aims to shed light on the many cross-disciplinary influences and imperatives which shaped Oxfam’s Emergency House within wider discourses on disaster relief and development in the 1970s.
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