DESIGN FOR COMMUNITIES PART 2

Assab One presents Design for Communities – Giacomo Moor per LiveinSlums, an NGO that works in urban territories with severe critical issues, and designer Giacomo Moor. LiveinSlums has been carrying out valuable urban regeneration projects for years, providing children and youth in Mathare, one of Nairobi‘s largest slums, with the means necessary for their reintegration into school and work. At the core of its projects, LiveinSlums puts the involvement of the very inhabitants of the areas in which it intervenes, who become key figures. This practice guarantees them the quality for “lasting human growth“, but above all the autonomy necessary to carry out the projects.

In 2023 Giacomo Moor went to Mathare to make furniture for the dormitory of Why Not Academy, a school designed and built by architect Gaetano Berni, which accommodates about 300 children. The furnishings – tables, benches, and bunk beds – were designed from a construction system, based on sequential interlocks, that can be applied to different pieces of furniture.

In 2024, LiveinSlums continues its collaboration with Giacomo Moor who this year went to the slum to build the kitchen premises for the canteen. Located in the courtyard of the complex and elevated on a concrete podium that protects it from weather and flooding, this minimal unit was built together with the local community using a modular construction system. A structural, yet lightweight, solid wood primary frame sets the design of the elevations with a constant rhythm and, thanks to its special geometry, allows a series of secondary panelling to slide within it.
Ease of adapting sizes in the three dimensions, constructive autonomy among parts, and easy replacement of each component are the design criteria that make this microarchitecture extremely flexible and adaptable to very different socio-environmental contexts.

Alessandro Treves, who has followed the construction of the architecture, will feature in the exhibition a photographic work resulting from his long stay on site.

To tell the public about the project, the spaces of Assab One, during Milan Design Week, will host an exhibition in which the microarchitecture, in full scale, reconfigured on the space and the photographic research of Alessandro Treves will be displayed.

Special thanks go to Koalisation, a partner in the realization of the kitchen in Mathare who donated four highly innovative cooking systems.

Biographies

Giacomo Moor (1981), after graduating in Design with a thesis on wood defects, published on Abitare magazine, he founds his studio in Milan in 2009. Together with his multidisciplinary team, made up of carpenters and designers, he develops products for companies, creates limited editions for design galleries and design and produces interiors for private clients, always supervising the entire creative process. His ability to combine technical and aesthetic skills, supervising the aspects related to production, are constant elements of his working method. He has participated in different exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, Singapore, Porto and other cities. Among his clients: Acerbis, Desalto, Galleria Luisa delle Piane, Giustini/Stagetti, Memphis, Spotti Milano, Triennale di Milano, Wallpaper, and Yoox.

Francesco Giusti (1969), a documentary photographer oriented toward the investigation of contemporary, social and identity related issues. Throughout the years he has explored different approaches: from photojournalistic essays to portrait stories to long term documentary-based projects. He has been awarded with prizes from different organizations such as the World Press Photo 2010. He is a lecturer in photography at NABA and he is co-founder of LiveinSlums.

Filippo Romano (1968) studied photography at the I.C.P. in New York. He is a documentary photographer working on architecture and urban landscape. He teaches in the NABA and IUAV masters of photography. He has collaborated with Domus, Abitare, Io Donna Newsweek and many other Italian and foreign magazines, is a founding member of the NGO LiveinSlums with which he has been running a project on Nairobi for 10 years.

Alessandro Treves (1988), born in a small town in the mountains of Piedmont, moved to Milan at the age of 19. He began pharmacy studies, which he would later drop out during an Erasmus to Oslo, where he would stay to work as an assistant in a photography studio. He wins a scholarship at the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia e Comunicazione in Rome during which he will also work as an assistant at Paolo Pellegrin’s studio. His studio is in Milan where he works mainly on publishing, fashion and photojournalism projects.

LiveinSlums is an NGO that implements humanitarian projects for disadvantaged contexts in developing countries. Active since 2008 in Italy and in several countries (Kenya, Egypt, Romania, Brazil, Haiti), it focuses its efforts in the slums of megacities and in fragile urban areas, through development and urban regeneration programs such as: agricultural and landscape projects related to food production and food security; animal farms, school construction, micro-credit activities.

Davide Fabio Colaci lives and works in Milan. He studied between the Faculty of Architecture of Porto and the Politecnico in Milan where he graduated and obtained a Ph.D. in Interior and Exhibition Design with Andrea Branzi. He is a professor of Interior Architecture design at the Politecnico in Milan and a lecturer in the Master of Interior Design program at NABA. In 2012 he founded his own studio with the aim of investigating the spaces and forms of contemporaneity, he carries out independent critical work as a curator for institutions and companies. He writes about design by being inspired by the changes affecting our culture.

Federica Sala, an independent curator and design advisor. She has been formed in the design department of Centre Pompidou. She collaborated with Fabrica, miart, 5VIE Art+Design, Airbnb, Vogue Italia, Cassina… In 2018 she curated, with Patricia Urquiola, the exhibition ACastiglioni at Triennale di Milano and she’s been part of the curatorial team for the new born ADI Design Museum with the exhibition about Giulio Castelli. She has an ongoing collaboration with Rizzoli International and since July 2022 she’s the Editor-in-chief of The Good Life Italia, a magazine about business&lifestyle.

Talking about the project for LiveinSlums, Giacomo Moor

The collaboration with LiveinSlum, which began in 2023 with the design of the furniture for the refectory and dormitory of the “Why not Academy” of the Mathare slum in Nairobi, continues with the design and realization of a small architecture dedicated to the preparation and distribution of food for the children of the same school.
This minimal unit, located in the courtyard of the complex and elevated on a concrete podium that protects it from weather and flooding, is designed to house a kitchen capable of cooking up to 300 meals a day.
The need to ensure easy passage of food from the kitchen to students and, at the same time, to insulate the cooking and preparation area from dust and the risk of theft at night was a major influence on the design logic.
A structural, yet lightweight, solid wood primary frame sets the design of the elevations with a constant rhythm and, thanks to its special geometry, allows a series of secondary panelling to slide within it. In this way, the facades, depending on the needs, can remain perfectly closed or deconstruct themselves allowing light to enter into a constant dialogue between indoor and outdoor.
The complete autonomy between the load-bearing frame and cladding panels allows for easy replacement of damaged elements without intervening on the entire structure. The same construction principle is applied to the design of the roofing, which is completely autonomous and fits into the supporting grid, thus accommodating the need to have a more or less inclined pitch depending on the environmental conditions of the place of installation of the unit.
Ease of adapting sizes in the three dimensions, constructive autonomy among parts, and easy replacement of each component are the design criteria that make this microarchitecture extremely flexible and adaptable to very different socio-environmental contexts.

Giacomo Moor

Text by Elena Quarestani

For the second time Assab One takes part in Design for Communities, the generous initiative of Liveinslums, hosting Giacomo Moor’s new project for the Why not Academy school in the Mathare slum together with photos taken on site by Alessandro Treves. Seeing so many expertise, so many talented professionals working on a non- profit project is a priceless experience, especially at a time when Milan expresses all its worldly and commercial vocation.

A way of operating independent of market logic that nevertheless produces inspiration, constructive thoughts and concrete applications: the expression of research motivated by real needs.
I am happy to share this project so consistent with the spirit that has animated Assab One’s activities for over twenty years.

Elena Quarestani

Text by Davide Fabio Colaci

Continuing the project for LiveinSlums brings us face to face with an important issue: what is the right attitude in thinking about new spaces for the School of Curiosity community in Mathare, Kenya? It is a question we keep asking ourselves for every LiveinSlums project but at this phase where we were asked to transform a place as symbolic and operational as the kitchen is, things seem to have a different density.
The initiative is always the result of a collective process, an open exchange between so many professionals, designers, curators, architects, photographers and NGO managers all committed to analyze, listen and return participatory design proposals. Participation in this case has not to be intended as the only transfer of shared community needs but more as the operational tool of a more complex evolution made possible through parts. Bits of experience, knowledge and relationships between the teams involved in thinking, making and building but above all reflections from distant places that interpret and support the design phase.
It is in this perspective that Giacomo Moor, together with the LiveinSlums staff, imagined a place that is traversable, permeable but at the same time able to close like a magic box and protect itself during the night. A model of “inhabited space” that activates relationships with a series of sliding doors and enhances them in the daily routine of meal giving or in the delivery of daily (often scarce) provisions. Like a game it opens and modulates on relationships, glances, physical exchange but above all on the symbolic value of flexible place, an adaptability that is not only technical but is relational.

Its value lies not only in having provided a more comfortable and functional space, but in having rewritten the relationship between inside and outside, between giving and receiving, between the group and the individual, but most importantly in the creation of a replicable model for other situations, for other contexts and even for other functions. So the design of this new kitchen will not be the one designed by Giacomo Moor alone, but it will be the one shaped by the workers and the daily needs of the community’s youth, who by freely adding a few steps for the entrance replied, “We only made those steps because there was leftover color!”

Davide F. Colaci

Text by Federica Sala

The idea of a second edition of Design for Communities started almost immediately, shortly after last year’s fuorisalone.
It was as if we all had the gut feeling that we had to go on, that we had to go deeper. Not out of a need to close the circle, on the contrary, precisely because of the awareness that certain circles are never closed.
After all, the greatest lesson of the sense of community is precisely the ability to do things together that, little by little, bring us closer to the goals we had set.
Time then, it is odd, flows slower in some places and faster in others.
Or at least our perception of time changes and by changing the scale of values attached to it, the impelling forces of the ‘new’ that almost always animate the presentations during Salone del Mobile, lose their power. While the desire to move forward, to delve into a topic, to continue contributing to a transformation, gains strength.
So let’s bet on the long term, in planting a seed that will one day become a tree, moving away from the forced idea that one must always think of the future, almost glossing over the present. Instead, Design for communities is a project rooted in the present. Hic et nunc in the true sense of the word: always Mathare, today and not tomorrow.

Federica Sala

Text by Silvia Orazi

In a severe poverty context such as Mathare, ensuring a daily meal for schoolchildren is a key component that affects the smooth functioning of a school and the attainment of an adequate enrolment.
School drop-outs are in fact often generated by the lack of food in schools. Food insecurity is one of the main problems that plagues all the slums of Nairobi. Child malnutrition is widespread in these contexts, with peaks of acute malnutrition in the poorest families.
In Mathare, a worrying percentage of children (about 50 per cent) suffer stunting because of this.

In order to reduce poverty and social exclusion in Nairobi’s informal settlements, the NGOs believe it is essential to work on three central factors in tackling food insecurity in the cities: urban agriculture, family economy and the environment.
The new kitchen designed for the Why Not Academy also aspires to become the point of arrival of a self-managed agricultural production by the school, which can guarantee adequate food for all children.
In Nairobi in 2023, the percentage of people in poverty due to lack of food rose from 38 to 41 per cent. The % is decreasing in the rest of Kenya, where it still stands at 27%.
It is estimated that in Mathare only 35% of the population can have one meal a day.

Silvia Orazi

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