Exhibition design Concrete for the Other Half?
Bauhaus Dessau, 2020.
Bauhaus Dessau, 2020.
The 2020 edition of Bauhaus Lab “A Concrete for the ‘Other Half’” was centred around a sulphur concrete block developed by the Minimum Cost Housing Group. Based at McGill University in the 1970s, the group researched informal and vernacular building practices to develop appropriate building technologies to address the housing question of the global South. The Lab, in turn, explores a complex constellation of actors, institutions, discourses and material flows behind both the design of a sulphur block and experimental projects of the MCHG.
This research is situated within a particular context of an anthropological turn of the 1970s when the notion of habitat offered a different understanding of building and dwelling. In reaction to the scientific rationality of industrialised mass housing of the post-WWII period, the new generation of architects engaged with new fieldwork methods, studying the everyday life of ‘the other half.’ Vernacular and self-built architecture based on locally available materials offered more sustainable solutions within growing environmental awareness and globalised material flows. International institutions merged this new interest in the “other” with a developmental discourse, supporting the search for appropriate techniques and materials.
Within this context, we invite you to follow our thought processes as we investigate complex layers of ideas and actors that underlie the development of a sulphur concrete block, or simply put: How can eight interdisciplinary researchers come together around a block?