Making Your Home, Wherever You Are | Abeer Seikaly | TEDxKlagenfurt

We are facing a massive humanitarian crisis of displacement - communities of millions on the move are fleeing violence & natural disasters.They carry what they can to resettle in unknown lands with nothing but a tent to make into a home. Despite our global technological and scientific advancements, refugee camps are inadequately designed for their inhabitants to truly live. How do we integrate various fields of knowledge and benefit from the wide pool of human experience in order to meaningfully innovate upon the ideas of shelter? This talk is a reflective and personal journey of an architect who discovers the elements that make a shelter into a home. Through the creative process, she builds upon multi-disciplinary notions of nature, tradition, community and well-being as she considers architecture and design to be a social and cultural practice. This process strives to create homes instead of just shelters and to plan communities instead of camps for the displaced. In essence, as Buckminster Fuller stated, “It is the way we live that needs attention.” Abeer Seikaly is an architect, artist, designer and cultural producer. She received her Bachelor of Architecture and Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. She joined Villa Moda, a lifestyle and luxury retail concept in Kuwait and the Gulf as a senior architect and project manager in 2005 and directed the first contemporary art fair in Jordan in 2010. In addition to her independent practice, Abeer is also the production manager of Adel Abidin, the internationally recognized Iraqi/Finnish video artist. In 2012, Abeer’s design, “The Chandelier,” was selected as the winner of The Rug Company’s Wallhanging Design Competition and she was selected as a winner for the Lexus Design Award for her work, “Weaving a Home”. With the later project, she addressed the need of refugees seeking shelter by creating a technical, structural fabric that expands to enclose and contracts for mobility while providing the comforts of contemporary life. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx