Architecture comprehends so many aspects of life , that it’s compulsory to talk about the role of service it plays in our society. In this page I’ll sum up all the contributions of architecture and will show some examples to make it easier to understand.
Social Architecture
First we should talk about the social architecture, which is the name we give to the architecture closely related to people. This is a really important character of the discipline as it provides, for example, home to people with less resources. This kind of building method is called co-housing and the architects of this projects tend to take advantage of all the spaces, in order to create a house that covers all the essential needs. They also include shared spaces which contribute to create social relationships and community.
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Inclusive Architecture
Another important aspect to bear in mind is the Inclusive Architecture. As architects, our goal is to provide living spaces for all, including those whose sensitive capacities are reduce or gone. That’s why it’s important to support both all physical and sensitive abilities, to enable every kind of people to enter our buildings. It is important too to ease people with different cognitive abilities, as for example children, to travel along our construction.
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Architecture for vulnerable groups
Architecture can also be used as a tool for different service disciplines such as medicine or commerce, playing such an important role in the development of them. Designing a good or a bad hospital, for instance, means a huge difference in the state of sick people and can even influence in the facility with which somebody under an emergency is attended. To show an example, it’s well known that the color of the interior or the green areas, between others, are a crucial factor in psychological health. This could be apply for orphanages and elder residences.
Architecture as Participation
The participation of people in the projects is really important too. Nowadays the amount of projects that involve the client in both design and construction are increasingly growing. People are included in the brainstorm of the design, taking into account all their needs, and also in the construction, serving as another worker. This new idea bring some original projects, such as The Poblado de Entrevías (Madrid), where the clients could pay part of the price of the dwelling by working. There are so many examples of this idea, which can be combined with social housing, as Elemental (Iquique, Chile), where the architect designed half of the house, leaving the design and construction of the other half to the owners.
Emergency Architecture
There are also examples of different projects related to major disasters, such as tsunamis catastrophes or volcanic eruptions. These kind of architecture is dedicated to the immediate housing to provide refugee to the victims of the different disasters.
Utopian Architecture
Finally, it’s important to talk about the different utopias that many architects have recreated, including moving cities and flexible buildings.
