MISSION STATEMENT

Meem Architecture is a not-for-profit group of architects working in disaster risk reduction and environmentally sustainable international development. The name is an anagram of meme - an imitable, modifiable cultural element*. In relation to the group's work, meme expresses the pursuit of replicable building principles and practices. Development-related interaction is an opportunity for mutual learning. We see appropriateness and sustainability as an approach that stands on vernacular knowledge and traditions, understanding of social, spatial, material and climatic opportunities which are enriched with contemporary research.

The group was founded in 2010 and became a registered NGO organisation in the Czech Republic in 2018.

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* A meme is an idea, behaviour, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. (Merriam Webster dictionary).

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices that can be transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. The word meme is a shortening of mimeme (from Ancient Greek mīmēma, "imitated thing") modelled on the gene. It was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. (Gordon, 2002. "Genes: a philosophical inquiry" New York: Routledge, p. 196)