ABSTRACT
Japanese-American architect, Minoru Yamasaki once wrote: ‘I know from personal experience how prejudice and bigotry can affect one’s total thought process. … If all human beings were given the opportunity to achieve their highest degree of capability … our world would be a better place’ (Quoted in Moore 2008: 249). Yamasaki was referring to racial prejudices, but there are other types of prejudice that affect many members of our society: the poor, the ill and the forgotten. Carefully designed architecture can reduce the stigma, by making low-rent housing that blends in effortlessly with the surrounding buildings. This is particularly important when those escaping homelessness, the mentally ill, recovering drug addicts, single mothers, or women fleeing abusive relationships are accommodated in well-established neighbourhood. These are ‘the hardest to house’.
