umbau is mobilizing. They are mobilizing a school in Africa. They will travel to a country whose borders are, for all practicality, artificially drived.
there was subversion right there. They prepare to bring architecture to Rwanda. The first ever. They will break the mold. ---- But not a violent break as that country once had.
The year was 1994 in April. 800,000 dead. 40 days. Machetes. Hutu v. Tutsi. The UN did nothing. Clinton and America did nothing. The West did not use the word "genocide". We felt we could not afford it. Saying "genocide" means we become committed. It means we must respond. Instead, the West look the other way and played bureaucratic jump rope with words like "genocide". Those who were there, hunkered down in the safety of their armoured fortresses. Machetes have a hard time there.
Enter Kagame. Enter the RPF. Enter hard fought liberation. But we didn't know about that then. We couldn't risk the reporters--too dangerous. From Uganda came the army of Tutsis. It was the Hutus turn to flee for their lives. But Kagame brought the back. Restorative justice - punitive justice = real justice. And through this restorative justice came real change. Let the ripple effect begin. The irony? 800,000 Tutsi migrated back. All are Rwandans now.
hooah.
Rwanda is now the safest country in Africa. It is very progressive and education is at the core. Their government is honest and competent. They are like the budding and blooming flower. umbau will go to cultivate and make better. the cultivate through architecture.
umbau and architecture it to push how we think. how we think pushes how we build.
KaosPilots + umbau + Rwanda = social entrepreneurship. KaosP
ilots' Dame Anita Roddick
says:
As the founder of The Body Shop, I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship -- even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford. It makes me smile that the Ivy League is so keen to 'learn' how to be an entrepreneur, because I'm not at all convinced it is a subject you can teach. How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it's obsession that drives an entrepreneur's vision? How do you learn to be an outsider, if you are not one already? Why would you march to a different drumbeat if you are instinctively part of the crowd
The malnutrition armband in colors of
green --> yellow --> orange --> red used in Rwanda = a metaphor for our times. After the
green, which is normal nutrition, the slope to
red which is, near death, quickens more and more. So goes the West at this point. We are in the middle. We are not
red. We are most certainly not
green. umbau seeks to mobilize in Africa because Africa = the future. The saying says,
"God sleeps elsewhere in the day but returns to Rwanda at night." umbau goes to emmerse this place in design.
It is happening.After 1994, there was no infrastructure. No carpenters, masons, electricians, power, water, economy, plumbers, contractors--ad nauseum. umbau cannot be effective here--in the italian hilltown of its birth. Neither can the West. We must get there to see. The Rwandans have a great thirst to learn. It is time to steer the boat and meet them. The Rwandan Minister of Education has given the
green light. It is time. It is happening.
READ change.
Rwanda = laboratory. Rwanda does not = colonization. There are enough Belgian structures there already. We must learn. We must strive to adapt. We must play off what Rwanda has become. It is only to go. Only to form. It is to be subversive. Bill Tate, founder of umbau says:
We are much in the way of navigation, improvisation, subversion (in a healthy sense), seeing. We have to play off of fields, circumstances, accidents that are often beyond our control. But we have a power of scent. We read the wind. We can scale walls and ford streams. It is an operational mindset.
We are not talking academic thinking. That is in the past. There is a better way. And it is liberating. There is no reason to stay within boundaries. We must break preconceived rules. For umbau, it is to help and then to disappear. The new school in Rwanda must make available grad and under-grad if it is meant to succeed. For the grad becomes the generator and the catalyst. This type of thinking must be inherited. Rwandans must be able to trace through the tree of influence.
umbau will bring in new categories of thought. It is time to give birth. We must be inventive. We must think subversively. We must think umbau. Rwanda will. It does. The school is beginning. What follows is true Rwanda. What follows is true umbau.
I am told about something that happened yesterday. It says more about this city and its inhabitants than many more grandiose war stories. “Honored’ by particularly heavy sniper fire, one residential section of Sarajevo experienced famine before it hit other parts of town. No one dared to stick his nose outside, much less venture out to the bread truck, for fear that the hyenas and their twins would indulge in a bloodbath.
Then someone had an idea. First, one person managed to get up on the roof of the building in which the sniper had installed himself, and lowered a plastic bag containing a loaf of black bread past the side of the sniper’s window down to the next level, where another person attached a rock to end of the line and managed to throw it to a neighbor waiting behind an open window in the building across the way. As soon as the line had been made taut between the two buildings, probably to the astonishment of the sniper who must have been watching, the bread bag was slid down along the line. Witnesses said that at one point it got stuck on the branch of a tree, but unexpectedly a long pole appeared out of a nearby window and sent the loaf on its way again. Finally understanding what was going on, the sniper opened fire, hoping to hit the bag or the line or whatever he could, but by then it was too late: the loaf had reached the window it was destined for. Deafening applause, shouts of joy, and a few shots rang out from the surrounding buildings.
SARAJEVO, A WAR JOURNALby Zlatko Dizdarevicp. 28
This is why umbau is going to Rwanda--to set up a studio and do projects where there are none. Where they are needed. It is because we have so much to learn from them.
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I NEED YOUR VOTE.
