Arrival Architectures

Governments worldwide formulate design policies in an attempt to define the complex relationship between political programmes and the design of the built environment. In a rapidly changing, highly interconnected globalized world, those policies typically refer to architectural typologies affected by contemporary events such as increased migration or climatic hazards. Albeit the fact that many of those trends are far from new (take migration, a phenomenon as old as humankind), it’s the scale and speed in which they occur that pose unparalleled challenges for countries worldwide as they struggle to come up with architectural solutions to respond to new spatial needs and demands.

Particularly the typology of arrival architectures, those spaces dedicated to the reception and accommodation of refugees and asylum seekers in the so-called “countries of arrival”, comes to the fore against the backdrop of sudden refugee movements amid the most recent events of global scope, marked by a sequence of crises that include armed conflicts and natural disasters. Architectures of arrival belong to architectures of exemption, spatial conditions of an exceptional state or exemptional circumstances where legislative exception to the existing societal norms have been introduced (Ebeling, 2020).

Taking form in reception centers and temporary accommodations for asylum seekers, by now they have become spaces integrated into our society, yet simultaneously they remain outside of the societal laws and their order, as they follow an exceptional dynamic and serve a specific purpose. Usually, they don’t ask for a specific setting, so they are located at any given place. Further, additional functions and required spatial programmes could be introduced to them subsequently, which together with the randomness in the choice of their location affiliates them with the group of non-places as defined by Augé (Augé, 2008).

To meet the heightened demands in welcoming and accommodating asylum seekers in the so-called countries of arrival, more and more of those exceptional architectures are being constructed, also in the European Union which has faced an unprecedent number of asylum applications in the past seven years. Particularly amid the recent immigration waves of 2015 and in the wake of the most recent armed conflict in Eastern Europe, the European Union seeks to reposition itself and to define a common approach in their asylum practices. Part of this practice is marked by the Reception Condition Directive which touches upon the design aspects of housing and living conditions inside structures of reception for arriving asylum seekers (EUAA, 2016). Through the EU Agency for Asylum’s support office, the EU seeks to disseminate information and guidelines on the established design practices to its member states in the form of design manuscripts and practical design tools (EASO, 2022). While theoretically bound by the same regulations, the arrival architectures in Europe demonstrate a stark variation in the design of those structures and differ in the organization of the accommodation for refugees. Yet, the rise in numbers and regulations seems to generally result in reduced availability, decreased quality of the reception conditions and into more mass accommodation facilities with camp-like characteristics, often by the use of elements not fit for housing purposes like shipping containers (Kreichauf, 2018).

Against this backdrop, the research seeks to look at how the European architectural culture is managing the much cited “migration crisis” between the ethical, legislative, and practical considerations the discipline is facing. A first step of the investigation is marked by approaching the official design policies and indications for the reception conditions of asylum seekers (as developed and formulated by political decision makers and governors). Those range from normative standards on spatial requirements to indications for the functional and infrastructural programmes, but also consist of more concrete design suggestions in the form of manuals.

After the examination of the normative and theoretical background, in a second step, the research explores different examples of arrival architectures across Europe. The aim is to not only get an idea of the present situation and current praxis through those case studies, but also to work out their differences along a set of factors. A first set turns towards the more concrete aspects such as the structures’ respective location (urban/ rural/ peripheric/...), their materiality (light or massive structures/prefabrication/…), and configuration (referring to the choice of assembly method in either modular or in free form). Further, more operational aspects are assessed, such as their logistical and regulative factors (infrastructure, service, surveillance practices, ….), the state of maintenance and, if applicable, decay, and the processes determining their existence such as the determined duration and the introduction of specific additional functions (the first set is generally presupposed by the second set of factors and strongly relates to the local context). This second part of the research will include a collection of plan materials, documentation of site visits, series of critical redrawings of the accommodation sites, as well as a photographic documentation.

The third part of the research marks an attempt to bridge the gap between the theoretical framework as defined by the states and governments through their design policies on the one, and the people involved in the realization and the use of arrival architectures on the other hand. The third part of the research is intended to be a series of interviews which will be related to the specific sites (either in the development process or as lived reality) and respectively to the design policy development. This final part could also become a way to assess how a seemingly innocuous architectural composition (of accommodation) can become a “negative” heterotopia with own inner logics and the dependency on civic sense both in the design and operation these structures (Foucault, 1984) (Ebeling, 2020).

For the aim of the 2023 CA2RE conference “Exchange”, an introduction to the European Union’s Reception Condition Directive and its respective design policies (and manuals) is proposed, along with the presentation of one to two selected case studies and their juxtaposition amid the above described set of categories.