Authors: Craig Coulton
Marcel Botha
Brief:
To, "Create a fully
equipped mobile unit and HIV/AIDS treatment centre to be used by medical
professions throughout the African continent".
Response:
"This is a
war. It has killed more people than has been the case in all previous wars and
in all previous natural disasters. We must not continue to be debating, to be
arguing, when people are dying,"
-Nelson Mandela, Johannesburg Sunday Times, Feb. 17, 2002
We declare war on AIDS, delivering strategic blows to this diseased battlefield. Offensive tactics engage transitional frameworks with hostile environments, spilling from its guts medical relief and sustainable development.
Fearless, medical soldiers
mobilize units in co-ordinated waves. Architectural conversions mimic
vernacular context, sensitive to cultural changes across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Architecturally camouflaged outposts instrumental in stabilizing this crippling
epidemic and social erosion guard and protect a fragile Africa, and her people.
Subsequent
beacons of hope litter the African landscape, integral to this schematic
campaign, WAR.
Target: South
Africa, the epicentre of the global AIDS pandemic
Mission Statement:
Initiate an offensive, Operation Thembela Africa (Hope for
Africa)
Objectives:
·
First
World recognition of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, integral to Third World development
·
Overthrow
the South African governments resistance to supporting treatment programs,
despite abundant resources and its liberalisation of the economy. Privatisation
will socially disrupt that which is not already eradicated by the residual
inequalities of the apartheid era
·
Redirect
foreign debts serviced to the First World, funding HIV-AIDS programs instead,
“It’s
untenable to be paying debt that could be used to fight the pandemic and
imperative to channel those funds to AIDS, given this holocaust,” Jeffrey
Sachs, UN special advisor, August 31, 2002, Earth Summit.
·
Forcefully end entrenched discrimination against women and
girls. Remove disparities in law, custom and education rendering their
vulnerability to HIV-AIDS
·
Sourcing
available technologies and medical advancements
·
Engineer
a delivery system to securely deploy medical “artillery”
·
Restore
humanity
Our Aim:
Where
does innovation come from? How do we leap beyond the path of predictability
into new territory?
Innovation
lies in the adaptation to design a delivery system for Africa, not so
much the unit. Medicine exists. Technology exists. Multifunctional ISO
Containers exist per se. A delivery system however, does not!
Container
architecture is a proven success in Africa having adopted roles such as
libraries, soup kitchens, skills training centres and more recently AIDS health
centres (e.g. Zwelethemba
Health Project, Worcester). Our aim is to reinforce this formula so widely
accepted across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Empowering
the people of Africa through restored humanity requires a level of social order
and engrained infrastructure. Permanence is key to these fragile communities
and is afforded in the residual frameworks being transformed from the deployed
Medi-Clinics of Operation Thembela Africa into prosperous community centres
sustaining development. This can only be achieved by a three-staged mobile
assault on HIV-AIDS.
Global Impact:
Nations face
'un-development' as AIDS destroys world's most valuable resource - people
AIDS affects global human capital
and strategies to mitigate the impact of AIDS must be implemented. UNAIDS
and WHO suggest a rapid increase in services and the capacity to deliver
health care (Geneva, 10 October 2002).
As a profession, architects must pioneer
the design of delivery systems confronting HIV-AIDS worldwide. Placing
Africa Under Siege is at the forefront of this struggle and the battlefield
used to introduce our generic model.
Renewable resources and
consideration for the planet (i.e. Greenhouse Effect) is a key criterion for
us. Solar energy coupling sustainable construction methods and materials will
form the groundwork to our campaign – WAR.
Local Impact: Inventory
for Deployment
ISO Shipping
Containers
This adopted mobile
framework will
·
Parcel medicinal soldiers with First World
supplies, and on board support bikes to furnish second phase mobility
·
Infiltrate
epidemical lines
seizing national and local transportation networks, taking custody of existing
infrastructure and mobilizing the modular framework from numerous platforms
(i.e. trucking, rail, air support)
·
Engage
prejudiced communities devoid of infrastructure introducing order and social reform
·
Address regional trades on all
subsistence fronts, evading visual arrest
·
Expose
a skeleton
(stripped of its “armour”) capable of embracing local building materials and
construction techniques. Alternatively the architecture imitates its vernacular
context
·
Service
Testing and treatment facilities (microbicides, antiretroviral drugs, diagnostics, and
vaccines)
·
Disseminate
information about
HIV-1 (agent inducing AIDS) and HIV-2 (immune suppression) and prescribed
Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapies (HAART) implemented in clinical trials
·
Provide
basic healthcare services. Infectious diseases like tuberculosis
and malaria kill millions debilitated by HIV and immune system failure. A precursor to waging war on AIDS is
improved sanitation and hygiene stabilizing infections
·
Educate communities about Preventative
Health Care (contraception)
·
Instrument low-tech mechanisms
sustainable in adverse conditions (economical)
·
Metamorphose by a process of mechanically
geared systems (i.e. variable jacks and spring mechanisms)
·
Operate manually (2 - 5 operatives)
·
Reduce maintenance. Low-tech
systems negate the provision for specialist training and operation
·
Juxtapose existing health programs like
Phelophepa Health Care Train. Receptive, this framework collates
diversified campaigns across Sub-Saharan Africa in a unified struggle
Phelophepa Health Care
Train (South Africa) launched in 1993 delivers health care, health education
and thousands of outreach programs (such as AIDS education) to more than 40,000
patients annually.
Strategically deploy the architecturally engineered vaccines. These outposts network Sub-Saharan Africa bridging the chasm between First and Third World medicine
Hope:
Notorious, the HIV virus is an outright winner of the evolutionary race in spite of the best efforts of innate and adaptive immunity.
Research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infection (NIAID) have found cells in the immune system which kill other immune cells infected with the virus, preventing the spread of HIV [Nature Immunology Journal].