| thankfully, posted in the Entertainment section (guess anyplace
| is better than the NGO section). also, note the journalists'
| automaton response in the title, Ban >> Ground Zero
Grappling with a vast ground zero
The areas devastated by tsunamis are about to become gigantic
construction sites. The challenge now is to build something human and
beautiful for those who lost so much, LISA ROCHON writes
By LISA ROCHON
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 8:15 AM EST Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005
After the nightmare of disaster comes the nightmare of reconstruction.
Even as the dead are being buried and emergency tents are being pitched
on the flats, Southeast Asia is rebuilding.
In a few months, the devastated coastlines will be transformed into
massive construction sites. In a decade, the romanticism of wooden
fisherman huts raised on stilts above the water could be entirely swept
away, replaced by a developer's dream of concrete apartment towers.
Beachside.
Preventing that kind of brutal reconstruction from taking place depends
on how quickly architects, landscape architects and urban designers can
bring their compassion and intelligence to the vast, meandering ground
zero of Southeast Asia. Three e-mails received at the time of this
writing indicate the kind of response that has been forthcoming from the
global architectural community.
....
Too often, ham-fisted and maladroit are the words to describe the
contribution of foreigners working their so-called magical designs over
devastated communities. Kenzo Tange's skyscraper city imposed during the
1960s on the fine-grained city of Skopje, Macedonia, is one of the
all-time calamities of design. Besides its inappropriate cultural
response, the design called for housing blocks to be built close enough
to fall onto each other, or, in one case, on a daycare centre, in a
region with a continued high risk of earthquake activity.
....
| anyone care to disambiguate this?
cont'd
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050112.wxrochon12/BNStory/Entertainment/