Emblazoned on Cameron Sinclair’s laptop are the words “I brake for architecture.” It’s a phrase that aptly describes a man working at breakneck speed to house the world’s homeless, those orphaned by tsunamis, hurricanes, war and other disasters.
Sinclair needs all the assistance he can get – currently, 5 billion people globally are either homeless or living in substandard housing. The title on his business card reads, “Eternal Optimist.”
Sinclair is the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), a non-profit that seeks architecture solutions to humanitarian crises and brings design services to communities in need. He was in Calgary recently to speak at the sustainable design series hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the University of Calgary. Founded in 1999, AFH has designed and financed diverse programs, from mobile health clinics to combat HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, to disaster recovery assistance in places like New Orleans, India and Sri Lanka. Sinclair won the TED prize in 2006 for his work with AFH, putting him in the illustrious company of winners like Bill Clinton, Bono and Jane Goodall.
In pursuit of financial and design support, Sinclair logs 300,000 miles per year. A combination of righteous anger and dogged determination keeps him going. Impassioned, engaging and occasionally profane, he uses his public appearances to deliver a stinging rebuke to the design and building professions. He is unrelenting in his call for change, citing corporate practices like greenwashing, where a corporate sponsor pays lip service to environmental values, or the reduction of architecture students to the status of CAD monkeys, chained to their desks until the wee hours with a caffeine drip to keep them going.
His mantra is “Design like you give a damn.” Accusing the architectural profession of becoming more and more irrelevant, Sinclair reminded audiences in Calgary that 98 percent of people who buy a home never meet an architect. For most people on the planet, securing decent shelter is a lifelong endeavour, and for many, a matter of survival. Yet the provision of basic shelter ranks low on the list of architectural priorities.
At Sinclair’s Calgary Chamber of Commerce appearance, political correctness gets short shrift as he launches into a presentation on how to change the world with sustainable design. Joking that he rarely bothers with suits, he immediately doffs his jacket and proceeds to criticize the architectural community for its preoccupation with jewel-like architecture. “Form follows finance” is how he dismisses the last twenty years of architectural effort. “Architecture is a political act. There are one billion people living in abject poverty. Another four billion are gradually improving their living standards in slums and low-cost neighbourhoods.” Sinclair raises the question: what is the design profession’s role given the overwhelming need for low-cost housing?
Reflecting on the question in an interview, Sinclair offers, “I think people forget that our original title was ‘master builder.’ We weren’t just architects, we were the coordinating body, acting as liaison and organizer, and also sharing our expertise with community. Now, architects take this victim-like approach, like, ‘Oh, I’m so low down on the totem pole, engineers are so much more important than me, I just do bathroom fixtures.’ You talk to these architects who are doing multi-million dollar projects in the city, and they’re whining about their position. You don’t become a leader by whining. The voice of the architect is their skills. Using them, you become a guiding force in a community. At the same time, you have to be humble, because communities become reliant upon you. If you’re not soft in your approach, you can become too heavy-handed, too controlling. It’s a careful balance.”
The real architectural need, he asserts, is out in the favelas and other crowded communities in the developing world; it’s on reserves all over North America; it’s the homeless population in every major city. “Billions of people live with substandard housing. Future architects are not going to be created in the halls of academia, but in the favelas. This new generation of architects will know how to respond to the most urgent needs humanity faces.”
The problem with the profession begins in architecture school. “We’re educating people to have clients in the commercial world, whether it be commercial, hospitality, health care. We’re told as students, ‘These will be your clients. So we’re going to train you so that you have the skill set to deal with these clients, to create spaces that they want. How do you maximize space for the largest profit for your client?’ That’s what people are being taught in school. How are you supposed to create dignified shelter when students aren’t being taught how to do that?”
Sinclair believes the design fraternity is out of touch with the general public. “People look at these celebrity architects and these sleek angles, and say, ‘I have a dog, I’ve got two kids, where do I put my shoes, I like to take off my shoes and put my slippers on.’ We’ve forgotten that we need to teach our architects about designing in the world, not only for a select part of the world.”
Architectural firms are culprits as well. Deans of architecture confer with partners from major architectural firms to set the academic agenda. Corporate partners arrive with a checklist of their need for interns in the next ten years. Observes Sinclair, “A dean wants to be in a position to say, ‘Ninety percent of our students get hired right after college.’ So it becomes very much about finance and intellectual capital. When your university’s strength is your ability to put your students into corporate firms, is that a good program? I don’t know.”
Sinclair maintains that architects are needed in the developing world to create structures that are safe, well constructed and sustainable. Of the profession’s failure to concern itself with basic shelter provision, he says, “The irony is that if you strip away the theory, the philosophies, the ego associated with creating space and creating architecture, all we do is provide shelter. Whether it be a place where commerce takes place, or health care or education, or just a home for a family, it’s shelter. When I look at the historical precedent, architecture is exactly about creating shelter. That is what we have done for generations. It’s only recently that we have lost our way.”
At AFH, architects work with interior designers, construction engineers, anthropologists. “We’re a coalition to address humanitarian shelter issues. AFH has grown because of the magnitude of the need and designers willing to undertake the work as volunteers.” The foundation has plans to scale up, ensuring more people are reached. Sinclair slyly refers to AFM as a “design orphanage,” a place of refuge for architects and designers who are escaping from conventional design practices.
Sinclair’s interest in shelter started at a young age. “I became an architect by mistake. I grew up in south London in a neighbourhood with post-World War II concrete block housing. I was affected by bad architecture.” While studying architecture, first in London then in New York City, Sinclair became intimate with the needs of the homeless, interviewing street people to understand their outlook and situation.
The real turning point came when Sinclair was 22. He was watching CNN coverage of the effects of the war in Kosovo. NATO was destroying urban housing and infrastructure, maintaining it would bring peace to Kosovo. Destroying communities to win a war struck him as insane. He asked himself, “How can I make a difference? What if interim housing fit for habitation were constructed for a five- to ten-year timeframe? That would give people time to rebuild their lives and create more permanent residences.”
Sinclair googled the UN. Using the contact information he found, he phoned and asked to speak with the head of the UNCR about the refugee issue in Kosovo. To his amazement, he was connected with a senior diplomat who took his pitch for constructing housing seriously. Sinclair asked what the UN was doing to assist refugees with re-housing. He was told nothing had yet been planned, and that he was the first architect the UN had heard from. Could he present his firm’s ideas at the UN? Sinclair hastily called several design friends, bribed them with beer to help with the presentation, and turned up as requested at the UN. Their pitch was so successful that Sinclair was given a mandate to come up with sustainable shelter for people displaced by the war in Kosovo.
Realizing that reconstruction of war-zone communities was too big to pursue on his own, Sinclair co-founded AFM with Kate Stohr. They announced a design competition for transitional housing in Kosovo; 300 submissions poured in from 30 countries. Five prototypes were built. The competition review panel included senior architects who volunteered their time to help the cause.
AFH was Sinclair’s first enterprise, and he started with a traditional business model: the foundation would build one project per year for the first five years. At the same time, he was getting 500 to 600 emails a week from community activists and designers inquiring how AFH could help in their communities. In response to this elevated interest, AFH encouraged the formation of chapters in various locations internationally. Forty-eight chapters are now operating in countries all over the world, including one in Toronto. Response has been so strong that AFH has plans to start a university in support of its mandate in 2008. AFH is currently conducting thirty-six projects in sixteen countries around the world, engaging 4,761 design professionals. Sinclair jokes, “If we registered as a professional design firm, we’d be the world’s largest.”
Sinclair’s book, Design Like You Give a Damn, came about because of his frustration with other architects. At a design conference, he became incensed during a discussion about the role of the profession. He challenged those present to “design like you give a damn.” The slogan was taken up by students present, who then stencilled it onto T-shirts and other products. Now in its sixth edition, the book illustrates dozens of sustainable projects being designed and erected under AFM’s umbrella.
A key component of AFM’s process is “urban acupuncture.” As Sinclair explains, “When you’re working in a post-destruction area, rebuilding is a signal to the community that they’re coming back. We usually do projects that we call the ‘urban acupuncture’ or ‘beacon’ projects. In the community of Waveland, Mississippi, devastated by Hurricane Katrina, not only are the buildings gone, but a history and memory of the community’s existence has been completely obliterated. While they’re trying to deal with FEMA, there was no launderette. How can you function if you don’t have clean clothes?”
AFM decided the community, temporarily housed in FEMA trailers, needed a launderette more than homes or schools. “It cost $600 to build. We designed it with a translucent roof, so that at night it was like a beacon, a sign saying, ‘We’re coming back’. It helped to establish, ‘We’ve got beyond the bad stuff, we’ve dealt with the loss, and now we want to rebuild.’ It’s like a catalyst.”
Like other TED prize winners, Sinclair was awarded $100,000 and a wish. He asked for an open source network that would facilitate design exchanges for architects and designers working on low-cost housing and community development projects. The awards committee, representing major technology companies like Google, was so impressed with Sinclair’s wish that committee members matched the original amount tenfold. The open architecture network (www.openarchitecturenetwork.org) makes it faster, cheaper and easier for people to communicate.
Sinclair has described the network as a gift to the architectural community. “We were able to bring together an incredible group of technology organizations. They donated a million dollars worth of services. The network is a huge repository of programs and projects, for social and environmental purposes – green housing, low-cost schools. The idea being that you can find solutions, and also that you can contribute. You can add your pro bono project, or maybe your focus is Tibetan architecture. We have resources where you can add new building skills and so forth.”
The hidden side of the network is a project management system. “You can actually upload all the files you need to run a project and you can work internationally. For instance, we have a project right now in Tanzania, and the engineer is Tanzanian-based. The architects are based in Helsinki, Finland, and in Gainsville, Florida, and they’re working through the network to share all of the CAD drawings, and sketches. Every three months they’re doing site visits, and they’re working with the community. The community architect is uploading information, doing charettes so that they can really work – and they’re working at a rapid pace. Each of them is doing a small amount of pro bono work. Together, they’re building this orphanage.”
Sinclair’s advice for design professionals is straightforward: “People know what needs to be done in Darfur. When you’re a design professional who has to step over or around homeless people on the street in Canada, you know what needs to be done. Find what you’re passionate about, and make a difference!”
www.openarchitecturenetwork.org www.cameronsinclair.com
