Simone Sfriso | TAMAssociati | Venedig
November Talks 2016 in Milano
This year November Conferences cycle opened its doors with TAM Associati, an Italian based architectural office internationally renown for its commitment in designing healthcare facilities in emerging countries. Often involved in social and humanitarian projects, the sustainable approach of the office merges the peculiar architectural language with local needs and local resources.
For TAM Associati architecture enhances individuals’ opportunities, providing inclusive space where multiple identities can meet and interact equally, impacts on people emotions, offering alternative visions that can affect the way users perceive and manage potential conflicts, and can be a media to restore hope and respect to people offended by poverty and wars.
Within the years, supported by Emergency, an Italian non governmental organisation NGO that provides treatments for civilians worldwidein war zones, TAM Associatidesigned health care buildings in Italy, Africa and Middle East.MassimilianoLepore started by introducing to the audience the Anabah Maternity Center, a health care facility to be realised in the Panjshir Valleyand described by clean aesthetic, natural materials and sustainable strategies. As usual, the white and red colours are prevalent, highlighting the Emergency logo and the division between levels. The simplicity of the structural solution, designed by an inclined roof anchored by pillars that draw waves onto the facades, is combined with squared and circular windows strategically placed where needed. Another forthcoming design is the Health Centre in the refugees’ camp of Qoratu, in Iraq. In Kurdistan , more than 2.5 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons are searching for a safe place to shelter from war contrasts. Emergency, starting from summer 2014, opened four health centres to offer high quality and free of charge treatments in three different camps. In this project, the architecture becomes a social media to restore dignity and, most of all, hope. Characterised by white and red colours, the creation of green, open spaces and playgrounds socially improved life in the campus, providing better conditions at physiological and psychological level. The holistic plan to provide free and high quality medical and surgical care to war victims moved the attention towards African countries with the NyalaPediatric Centre, realised in Sudan in 2011. The clinic, which supplies care services to seven refugee camps, is constructed around a giant baobab that shades the network of courtyards designed around the tree. Besides, the surgical centre took inspiration from the traditional windcatcher used to cool the indoor spaces, the bagdir, to create a wind tower that naturally ventilate the clinic and works as a landmark element.
In 2013, TAM Associati won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture with the “Salam” Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, while in 2014 their commitment has been awarded with the Zumtobel Group Award for the Paediatric Centre realised in Port Sudan. TAM Associati works includes also the realisation of two outpatient centres in Italy, resulting from the collaboration with Emergency within the Programma Italia project. The two care facilities, realised between 2014 and 2015, are intended to be used by all people who cannot effort health care treatments. The programme has been established to improve facilities in the southern part of Italy in order to assist immigrant flows. Beyond buildings, TAM Associati developed two mobile clinics, one in 2011, made from two abandoned tourist buses and two others, in 2014, made from campers. These mobile units, used for definite periods in areas with strong immigrant presence, constitute a reliable way to guarantee medical assistance where needed.
In 2016 TAM Associati has been invited by artistic director Alejandro Aravena to design an exhibition for the Venice Biennale “Reporting from the front”. The exhibition, titled “Taking Care”, describes the role of architecture in facing global challenges, the battles as well as the strategies used in the country and outside. Simone Sfrisobrought together several interesting projects related to health care facilities to describe in which way the architecture can be used as a “taking care” approach to improve refugees and immigrant lives. Inside the Italian Pavilion, the exhibition is divided into three sections, asking visitors to think of their idea of common good, meeting a collection of projects that tells how built spaces can be useful for a community, and asking which kind of actions can architects do in order to face real problems of the contemporary world. For TAM Associati, architecture must nowadays cope with new conflicts where ideology and religion are often used to validate uncritical visions. Taking care in architecture is a response towards unlimited growth and exploitation, is the consciousness of creating new meanings and possibilities for people according to spaces.
