Humanitarian architecture: On the glamour meter, the term is right up there with “FEMA trailer.” But during a recent discussion on the topic at a noisy Dinkytown bar, my ears perked up when an “elephant migration specialist” was listed along with soil engineers, architects, and government officials as a crucial collaborator on a relief project in a tsunami-struck Sri Lankan village. Cameron Sinclair, who had just finished a semester as a visiting professor at the U of M, was talking about how designers were granted permission to rebuild several buildings on a vacant lot. But after meeting with community members, they learned why the lot had stood empty so long: “It was on a migrational route for elephants, and when elephants get really tired, they lean against trees and fall asleep … They lean on poorly built houses and then the houses collapse.”
The housing was built elsewhere.
While perhaps not truly glamorous, this bit of trivia does offer a glimpse into Sinclair’s work as humanitarian architecture’s foremost advocate. Sinclair founded Architecture for Humanity six years ago with his wife, Kate Stohr, and since then they’ve hosted design competitions to address systemic health and housing problems. In post-disaster situations, they raise funds and work with pro bono architects who move to their host countries to work for up to two years. Their low-budget, sustainable solutions have ranged from a mobile HIV/AIDS clinic in Africa to earthquake-proof homes in Kashmir, transitional housing in war-torn Kosovo to, yes, structures that drowsy elephants won’t topple. Beyond its official work as a nonprofit organization, AFH is also something of a movement: Dozens of independent chapters have formed in cities like New York, London, and Minneapolis. Our chapter (afh-mn.org), is particularly active, with about fifty designers doing pro bono projects in Sri Lanka, New Orleans, and outstate Minnesota.
Born in Great Britain and trained at the University of Westminster and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, Sinclair’s pedigree is impressive, but his realm is far removed from that of celebrity architects—“starchitects” in the vernacular—both in terms of process and ego. “If you’re working in a slum situation, for instance, if a project becomes your baby and you take total ownership of it, then it’ll never be implemented. Some of the designs we’ve worked on look beautiful on paper, but weren’t as sexy when implemented,” he admits. “Your vision isn’t the same as the people who are going to eventually live in these homes.”
Most projects are collaboratively designed, hatched and revised during long meetings in church basements or at late-night sessions over curry and beer. The goal is to arrive at solutions that emerge from, rather than are imposed on, communities. For instance, one village in Sri Lanka now generates electricity from the wind. Residents, remembering the agricultural windmill used there fifty years ago, suggested it. “They didn’t want solar technology,” he says. “They didn’t want rainwater collection. They were like, ‘We had a windmill, we know how that works, so we want to have a wind farm.’”
Sinclair admits that experimentation in his line of work is different from that of, say, Frank Gehry or Steven Holl. Since he’s dealing with the lives of people, often devastated by grief, buildings must conform not only to their needs but to their often culturally specific definitions of beauty. Sinclair’s mantra, which is also the title of AFH’s just-released book Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, calls architects to be sensitive to their cause and their clients. “When you’ve lost everything, it doesn’t just mean you’ve lost all your clothes and all your equipment. It’s almost like the eradication of any memory you’ve ever had,” Sinclair says. “If you design the technically sophisticated but aesthetically challenged house, but it’s not beautiful, nobody’s going to care for it … The community ends up painting and decorating the building with their own traditional crafts. And it turns out really beautiful because it’s got part of that community in it, and there’s a level of honesty in the aesthetics.”
Modest as his working methods might be, celebrity has nonetheless found Sinclair. He’s been nominated for the Designer of the Year award at London’s Design Museum, and was awarded one hundred thousand dollars to “make a wish come true” at the prestigious Technology Entertainment Design conference this year. He’s using the winnings to develop an open-source network for architecture. The system will provide copyright protection for designers’ work, while at the same time offering those plans for free to be adapted and modified as geography, culture, and community needs dictate. He hopes it’ll further his aim of bringing good, safe design to people in the world who normally couldn’t afford it.
“I was joking about the fact that [celebrated Iraqi-born architect] Zaha Hadid probably has twenty people who can afford her services,” he says. “But we have 5.6 billion potential clients. That’s job security.”
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