Building Structures – Calais Refugee Camp

2 November 2016 5:00 pm at Jean Monet Lecture Theatre, University of Limerick

Speaker: Grainne Hassett

Senior lecturer at SAUL Grainne Hassett to present her work Building and Breaking Structures at the Calais Refugee camp. In August 2015, Grainne founded The Calais Builds project, and to date has designed, organised and built some of the major community infrastructure of the Calais Refugee Camp.  Grainne will discuss the building and breaking of many systems of social and collective organisation in the camp. She will explain how she has stepped into to the political and ethical void surrounding the refugee camp, and developed a way of building in very difficult circumstances essential facilities at the camp such as the women and children’s centre, Youth Centre, community Centre and the vaccination centre.  This is a story of architecture and building without budgets, without political will, without a future, and without hope, devoid entirely of the utopian hubris surrounding architecture, but for people.