Renate Carius, Sydney, Australia : New Zealand Master Class 2007 : 

Glenn Murcutt Master Class 2009 :  EU Master Class Ireland 2011

[ international aid : small projects : remote community development ]

Small Education-based Projects : Ladakh and Nepal, Himalaya

When life is lived at the edge, as it is in Nepal and Ladakh, with restricted access to some or all of the basic human needs such as clean water, shelter, sanitation, healthcare and education, resilience becomes a necessity for survival. Despite these hard living conditions, I am constantly amazed at the genuine warmth and the tenacity of the people and communties I work together with.

These images have been chosen from the last 3 years of my work. They were taken to capture the fine grains of ordinary life in the Himalaya. They lie behind small, education-based projects in Ladakh and Nepal. This work is in response to conditions of poverty, political instability, civil war, natural disaster and geographic isolation.

With a focus on young children, our small projects in education, dental health and infrastructure aim to improve the conditons of basic human needs. They are simple but effective and repeatable. 

A large part of my work takes place in remote communities where collecting daily water or harvesting a crop is of primary concern. In this context, common questions of, and responses to, architecture are challenged. Working remotely means asking a different set of questions - is the road passable, is there a water source, is it festival time, what materials and skill sets are available, what are the cultural parameters, is there political stability and so on? To find answers I seek local knowledge. Observation and collaboration with educators, monks, students, farmers, medical workers, engineers and so forth, inform the process. All of the projects are identified by the community and executed by hand by local people.

Equally, funding is hard-won, reading plans near impossible and organization is unpredictable. To add to complexities, time is elastic, extravagance discarded and the work arduous. However.... the warmth, generosity, colour, humour and the needs of the people are the paradoxes that resonate to move things towards vital community development goals.

As architects we conceive of and put things together.

The series of images show some of the small projects across education, health and infrastructure created together with communities.

https://www.linkedin.com/today/posts/renate-carius+0_3K6G6RqVzOhc1DFPB9DMM

-

www.ozetecture.org