The earthquake that devastated Pakistan last month destroyed the homes of an estimated 3 million people. Thousands of families are still living in tents, while others have no shelter at all.
Now, a group of local architects is hoping to help the country build new earthquake-safe housing. One of them will be in Pakistan for the next three weeks, meeting with local engineers, architects and nonprofit organizations to share ideas on rebuilding.
The architect, Niveen Sayeed, is part of an initiative recently launched by the Boston chapter of Architecture for Humanity. The group ended the first phase of a design competition just last week to gather ideas on earthquake-resistant housing that Sayeed could share with Pakistani officials.
An architect with FD Adams and Assoc. in Waltham, Sayeed was scheduled to leave for Pakistan this week. She is traveling to Pakistan for both professional and personal reasons.
Sayeed, a Belmont resident, is originally from a neighborhood that’s 25 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake. Family members who still live in the area were affected by the earthquake. The homes of Sayeed’s grandfather and aunt and uncle were damaged.
“It’s a very personal cause to me,” said Sayeed.
The 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the region bordering Pakistan, northern India and Afghanistan on Oct. 8. More than 87,000 people were killed, with most of the deaths occurring in Pakistani territory. Pakistani leaders have appealed for more than $5 billion in aid to rebuild the area.
“The amount of people that have died in this earthquake is about two or three times the amount” of those who died in the tsunami that struck Indonesia last year, said Sayeed.
But Sayeed said because the earthquake occurred in a remote area of the world that is associated with terrorist activity, it has not received the amount of funding that the region affected by the tsunami obtained.
Getting ‘Good Ideas’
Just days after the deadly earthquake, Sayeed was at a meeting of the Boston chapter of Architecture for Humanity, an international organization that in the past has helped build AIDS clinics in Africa and transitional housing for Kosovo’s refugees.
The group was meeting to discuss various projects with which it could get involved when Sayeed recommended that the architects help with reconstruction efforts in Pakistan.
Since so much energy was focused on helping the region affected by Hurricane Katrina, which occurred just six weeks before the earthquake, the architects decided to turn their attention to Pakistan.
As part of their efforts, the architects agreed to begin a two-phase design competition. During the first phase, which ended last Monday, the architects solicited ideas for earthquake-safe housing.
“We want to start a discussion both here in Boston and Cambridge and in Pakistan,” said Lora Kim, an assistant professor of architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology who is helping to lead the effort. “The point is to get good ideas and then to end up building them.”
Kim said she has received lots of e-mails about the competition, which has garnered attention from professionals in cities like New York and Washington, D.C., and as far away as India and Australia.
Sayeed, who will assess the ideas received through the competition with Pakistani officials, will journal their reactions and collect information that she will share with local architects.
“We need knowledge and this is a way to get more knowledge,” said Kim. “Sometimes you have fantastic ideas but they’re not actually doable.”
The ultimate goal is to have a buildable prototype, explained Kim.
When Sayeed returns to the Bay State, Architecture for Humanity plans to launch the second phase of the competition, which will involve selecting entries that can be built.
“We’re going to identify, based on my field assessments, which of the entries are viable options to build,” said Sayeed.
As part of the second phase of the design competition, Architecture for Humanity is also hoping to kick off a fund-raising campaign to send architects to Pakistan to help build the prototype. Kim said the architects are trying to connect with experts from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business School to help with the fund-raising effort.
In addition to the design competition, local architects are developing a simple manual for reconstruction, said Sayeed.
Many people living in Pakistan are starting to rebuild, but according to Sayeed they lack the knowledge and technology to construct safe housing so a basic manual that people can follow is needed.
Another issue that the local architects are planning to tackle is the creation of earthquake-safe schools in Pakistan, said Sayeed, who noted that 7,000 schools fell within the first few seconds of last month’s earthquake.
“The largest percentage of [earthquake] victims [is] children,” she said.
Besides Sayeed and Kim, the other members of Architecture for Humanity Boston who are leading the Pakistan reconstruction effort are Michael McHugh, a Boston architect who is a member of the Boston Society of Architects’ Task Force to End Homelessness; and Hye-Young Chung, a graduate student at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Ideas collected from the first phase of the competition will be exhibited at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from Dec. 10 through Dec. 23.
