Filipina Architect interviews Arch. Tricia Sardinia, Managing Director, Architects Exchange (AEX)
Oftentimes the science in architecture overshadows its own art. Structures are built out of a need to create. At times, the practice can be counterproductive; in worst cases, destructive. But what happens when it is architecture that answers a basic human desire: food.
This desire to incorporate design in sustainable praxis has become a mantra for architects like Tricia Sardinia.
Sardinia is managing director at Architects Exchange (AEX), and she might as well be a flag-bearer for food security among Filipina Architects.
“As design principles go, mine is fairly simple. Context always plays a huge role, so whatever and wherever you are designing, that and the end users are the main parameters. Context is your culture, environment, heritage, activities and all that,” she tells Filipina Architect.
Sardinia calls architecture design “a creative and technical process,” advocating for the use of green technology and sustainable materials and techniques.
While the pandemic has forced the Davao City-based AEX to adopt a work-from-home setup, the advocacies Sardinia has espoused still remain. Among these are the need for sustainable (and if possible, homegrown) food systems.
“One of my special interests since post-graduate school is related to Food and Architecture. Reading up on Carolyn Steel’s Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, was both entertaining and enlightening as a jump-off,” she said.
While the samples in Steel’s Hungry City are admittedly foreign, the parallels with our local food system are undeniable. “As we now live in a global pandemic, it is critical that we really look at how we feed our families healthy food within the city.”
For some more context, let’s recall the current general community quarantine guidelines in cities like Davao. Food is no longer as easy to gather as before. Curfews have complicated public market operations that one can no longer drop by at the daily public market bagsakan as easily as before. Some groceries manage influx by alternating entry, whatever the rules are in each city. In the case of farmers, while farming is legal (and farm produce and meat easily pass through checkpoints), distribution is another story altogether.
A special report of the Philippine Daily Inquirer cites several disruptions in Philippine food systems. This affects nutrition at the individual level, with some recipients of rice dole outs in urban poor areas relegated to pairing the grain with available resources: in worst cases salt and cooking oil.
With government agencies scrambling to incorporate one another’s programs to solve hunger, the Food and Agricultural Organisation was quoted in the PDI article as saying “The bottom line is that poor people in urban areas are seriously affected not only by the spread of the virus itself but also by policies and measures to contain its spread—unless effective [programs] are put into place to mitigate these effects and to support their livelihoods.”
For firms like AEX, the idea isn’t simply limited to how homes are designed. There’s a larger, interconnected series of issues that need addressing.
“What do we need to do to be resilient, self-sufficient and capable in food emergencies when you are unable to move safely in urban areas? A simple immediate solution might be to grow your own food. But on a systematic, more macro-perspective view would be to look at how we support local sustainable growers within 100-150km of our place.”
Sardinia says institutional policies are clearly affecting farmers and producers. “So that we do not have to rely all the time on imports spending a ton of money. This is a big thing when we want to close the loop from production to waste and resource management.”
Sardinia was able to connect this knowledge into some of the firm’s works with their clients. One project, for example, incorporates fruiting, vining, and leafing crops in a small yard. The design also encourages hands-on planting, propagating, even composting right at their doorstep. Not to mention this is a residential design that could be replicated practically anywhere with similar conditions. In theory, the idea can be institutionalized and replicated everywhere, with the right nudge.
While some designers do away with sustainable solutions, Sardinia’s designs embrace them. Gray water, for example, forms an integral part of biophilic ecosystems. The dwellers of one home go through the motions of daily life, but instead of just throwing away gray water, these are instead recycled.
The design essentially encourages residents to grow their own food.
With a global pandemic in the way of what we have been used to for decades (no more trips to the market, and now more expensive delivery-based purchases), Filipina Architects like Sardinia are at the forefront of solutions for the question of food security.