July 13th, 2018
David Stairs
Homemade hotplates
Some of the most interesting places in modern day Kampala are the tinsmith’s stalls opposite the Balikuddembe Market. Here sheet metal is daily transformed from dross into useful implements for household chores. The scope of activity is only limited by the workman’s imagination as numbers of boxes and appliances are tinkered together.
Charcoal iron
Here men hammer metal on railroad steel. There others make a variety of domestic vessels. One can find rattraps, funnels, oil lamps, cast aluminum kitchen ladles, hotplates and charcoal irons, or pasis. The latter, on first appearance, do not look safe. Comprised of metal, with a wooden handle, one will not find an Underwriter’s Laboratory seal of testing approval on these devices. Yet, most passersby are not concerned. Vernacular electric irons were once widely available, but the decline in the level of Lake Victoria has resulted in a nationwide power shortage and craftsmen have responded to the market. Those who are connected may welcome relief from the high price of imported appliances that can cost twenty times as much.
Sheet metal is a valuable commodity and, as in other developing countries, it is recycled in Uganda. The paraffin pump pictured above began its life as a drum of corn oil. An empty can, a pair of tin snips, and a little solder are all that’s needed for its transformation.
Tadooba, or wind-proof kerosene lamp
Such simple means can be applied to a variety of implements, like the paraffin lamp, or tadooba, pictured. It has glass shielding, making it “hurricane proof.” The mbira pictured below was also crafted from recycled sheet metal. With the addition of some hammered steel keys and a wooden tension peg, music issues from an instrument quite different from the usual carved-wood version made for the tourist market.
An especially fantastic example of reverse engineering is popcorn machines. Based upon their Western cinema lobby counterparts, right down to the stenciling, such machines in Uganda are found in most public markets and outdoor places where a small bag of popcorn will cost 100 shillings (about 5 cents).
Reverse-engineered popcorn makers
Another instance of stenciled decoration occurs on the ekyuma, or footlockers, so prevalent in bus and taxi parks. Ugandans like them because they are durable and rat-resistant, and they are required equipment for boarding school pupils. Stenciled with a wide variety of designs, they are suited to fit almost any taste.
Ekyuma, or metal footlockers
Being “on African time” is an adjustment for Westerners accustomed to punctuality and expedience. In Uganda, most people take the clock with a grain of sand, and two hours is an average tardiness for appointments. So it is intriguing that Ugandan craftsmen would invest as much effort as they do into making labor saving devices, time being the primary object of saved labor. And yet, even though you might not want to trade in your Westinghouse or GE appliance for one of these stripped down vernacular models, many would and do not hesitate to purchase convenience at a truly affordable price.
Decorative stencils for ekyumas
David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project
Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on The Kingdom of DIY
June 4th, 2018
David Stairs
Nativity façade of Sagrada Familia
If you are planning to visit Barcelona for reasons other than seeing the FCB, Futbol Club Barcelona, chances are you will visit a site designed by Antonio Gaudi. Gaudi is the city’s favorite son, and his works are among the town’s best-known tourist attractions.
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Posted in Ideas | Comments Off on Nature’s Geometry
April 29th, 2018
David Stairs
The Original Omusajja along Entebbe Road
Along the highway leading from Uganda’s former colonial capital Entebbe to its modern capital Kampala there is a landmark that characterizes colonialism in a nutshell. Known as “Omusajja ku luguudo lweNtebbe” or just “Omusajja” for short in Lugandan, “the Man along Entebbe Road” is a fifteen-foot high statue of a white body builder flexing his muscles as the former symbol of durability for the Lweza Clays company.
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on “The Man”
March 27th, 2018
David Stairs
Say what you want about Art Nouveau, but when it came to invention its practitioners were not short-handed. For an example, I turn to Gaudi’s most famous residence design.
Casa Battlo, or “House of Bones,” so named for its bone-like exterior columns
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on World’s Most Decorative House
February 24th, 2018
David Stairs
When we speak of malls today Americans generally mean the air-conditioned, all-inclusive mega-mall with its food court and full-service-everything. But when I was a kid growing up in upstate New York such things didn’t exist, or, if they were being developed in cold places like Southdale Center (1956) we didn’t know about it. Of course, the idea of an indoor galleria was not new. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, arguably the modern world’s first mall, was constructed in the 1860s in Milan, Italy.
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on The Roadside Bazaar
January 23rd, 2018
David Stairs
Ruin porn is everywhere. Photos of Detroit’s semi-preserved Michigan Central Station abound, and photographers continue to document while critics and journalists debate the pros and cons of what Dora Apel in her recent book Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (2015) terms the “deindustrial sublime.”
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Repurposing Dinosaurs
December 28th, 2017
David Stairs
Slingshot made from bicycle innertube
I’ve talked many times about how successful African DIY design is when it comes to recycling materials. Most African nations are not heavily industrialized, except those involved in mining, so technology and manufactured goods are often imported. What’s more, the climate in many parts of the continent fluctuates between hot and dusty, or torrentially wet— not an ideal scenario for many materials.
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Thrift
December 2nd, 2017
David Stairs
There’s a little place in the Indian city of Agra famous as a testament of a man’s love for a woman.
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Posted in Indian Journal | Comments Off on Crazy For Symmetry
November 17th, 2017
David Stairs
Completion of Kampala’s Northern Expressway has been plagued by delays in right-of-way acquisition
Returning to Uganda for the first time in ten years has held a few surprises. The charm of its people, and the beauty of Uganda’s countryside are unchanged, but the congestion in the capital Kampala is alarming. Partly this has to do with migration and growth. As the nation’s population increases, the sprawl of Kampala explodes.
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Posted in African Journal | Comments Off on Gridlock
October 29th, 2017
David Stairs
I was recently in Prague, which in June 2017 celebrated the 75th anniversary of one of the most heroic and daring commando actions of the Second World War. On June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia was attacked on his way to work when his Mercedes slowed at a bend in the road. His assailants, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were Slovakian and Czech volunteers who had been trained in Britain and parachuted into Czechoslovakia to conduct Operation Anthropiod.
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (courtesy Wikipedia)
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Designing Death
October 2nd, 2017
David Stairs
courtesy TheNation.com
The iconic images of Houston under 10 feet of water should have by now burned themselves into your brain. “How did we get to this point?” you ask. With one word: Design.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Design IS the Problem
August 13th, 2017
The third and final article in our series on the American prison system. —Ed.
Hannah Boyd
For you, DJ, the person who shared part of his life with me.
And for you, former mayor of Indianapolis Greg Ballard, the person who vehemently rejected the concept of prison slave labor, the implications of the 13th amendment, and the profiteering by corporations that makes everyone complicit in the practice of neo-slavery(1).
On day one of our architecture studio, we are tasked with designing a 4,000 bed jail with 27 courtrooms and administrative offices. The project had been an effort by former mayor Greg Ballard to consolidate the sprawling jail network that currently exists in Indianapolis (2). The project never came to fruition, and the new mayor, Joe Hogsett, is currently reviving the project with new ambitions (3).
—
The 13th Amendment
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Reparations
June 23rd, 2017
This essay continues our investigation of America’s prison system, and extends D-A-P’s collaboration with Ball State architecture students into the fifth year. —Ed.
Julia Voigt
Despite jails being one of the most recognizable typologies of the built environment, the criminal justice system itself is far removed from the realm of the architectural profession. This lack of attention given to the penal system within the profession highlights a larger, societal issue at hand: that, as noted by author Michelle Alexander, “… criminals are the one social group in America that nearly everyone–across political, racial and class boundaries–feels free to hate” (Alexander 228).
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Shared Meal
April 16th, 2017
David Stairs
Every once in awhile you meet a group of students that stands out. This was the case with my Junior studio a year ago. When we collaborated with the School of Businesses’ entrepreneurial contest, they were all in, and we just clicked. I knew 2017 would be my year to mentor our Graphic Design capstone project, and I wanted it to be good, so I signed up to teach the Fall senior studio leading into the winter capstone.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Critiquing the Prison Industrial Complex
February 25th, 2017
David Stairs
Image: David Stairs
I recently started reading Volker Ullrich’s biography HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939 out of a curiosity to better understand the motivations of the man often ranked as history’s most malevolent monster. Along the way I became fascinated by the parallels between Uncle Adolf and a more recent demagogue of the American ilk. These are the similarities I noted:
•Mendacious use of facts
•Scapegoating a religious group
•Extreme nationalism
•Intolerance for criticism
•Bullying as a defense tactic
•Narcissistic
•Authoritarian
•Inciting violence
•Histrionic
•Temperamental
•Censorious
•Contempt for adversaries
•Dislike for administrative work
•Prima donna tendencies
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on The Power of John Heartfield
January 13th, 2017
David Stairs
Control is the object of consolidation, what Nietsche once called the “will to power.”
Soul Searching
Consider the rise of multinational corporations. Monopoly is the capitalist ideal. Although shrouded in so-called antitrust laws preventing market domination— the idea being that competition is healthy for markets— captains of industry have always sought market dominance. For brief periods of time some capitalists, Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller to name two, dominated their industries and became enormously wealthy.
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Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on On Swallowing and Being Swallowed
November 20th, 2016
Carter Scholz
In the prehistory of personal computers, Lee Felsenstein and some others created Community Memory in Berkeley in 1974: a publicly available teletype terminal, connected to a mainframe computer via 110-baud modem. Users could post and read messages at a few different sites. Felsenstein had read Ivan Illich, and he saw this as a tool for conviviality. It was a novel vision in a time of monolithic mainframes: computers as liberating and empowering, both personally and socially.
Lee Felsenstein / Courtesy Lee Felsenstein.com
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Posted in Feature | Comments Off on Apple vs. Design
October 22nd, 2016
David Stairs
When I think of blue and red the notion of Democrat and Republican naturally come to mind. One can find any number of red-blue maps online that attempt to represent our political differences. I even wrote about it here after the last Presidential election. Happily, there is another, earlier visual application of red and blue: the road maps of the 1930s to 1950s.
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