Author: Paul Schmelzer

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.”

Feels like the base of my skull could just about touch my shoulder blades, I’m craning my neck so hard. Still I can barely make out the terra cotta sculptures high atop the new Washburn Lofts on the recently hoity-toitified Minneapolis riverfront. There are three millers 11 stories up, an homage in stone to the industry that earned Minneapolis its title as the world’s flour superpower from 1885 to the mid-1930s. Created by Minneapolis sculptor John Karl Daniels—better known for his ominous bronze statue of Leif Erickson on the Capitol grounds—the works depict the history of flour milling. The industrial equivalent of Darwin’s march from primordial ooze to proper man, the figures advance from a half-naked brute squatting over a mortar and pestle to a vaguely Dickensian worker, his hair neatly parted, as he crouches over an updated version of the same tools, to a fully erect modern miller, standing tall in a peaked cap and trim jacket as he casually oversees a milling machine. While it’s difficult to see from this distance, the machine could be a “middlings purifier,” a device introduced here around the turn of the century to sift husks from wheat, leaving the pure white flour heralded worldwide for its Gold Medal quality.

Carved by Daniels at half size and enlarged to eight feet in height by a commercial reproduction firm, these regionalist idealizations of the working man are fitting ornamentation for this 1914 landmark. In the first half of the 20th century, employees of the Washburn Crosby Company (a precursor to General Mills) packaged flour here. They tested recipes in the original Betty Crocker kitchens and broadcast the “Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air” on WCCO radio (whose call letters came from the mill’s name). Most chilling about the works is their accidental accuracy. Like so many flesh-and-blood workers of Mill City’s heyday, the central figure has lost an arm. This industry of pulleys and water wheels, flour-dust explosions, and churning gears propelled Minneapolis to the top of another less lauded industry—production of prosthetic limbs. While someone living in one of these million-dollar lofts today would have to make about $170 per hour, its first tenants made about $6 a week—and sometimes paid an arm and a leg for the privilege.

It was Ole Bull’s eighth birthday party, and the concert master took full advantage of the open bar, rendering himself unable to fulfill his duties with the house band. Bribed with candy, the boy filled in, ripping through a Louis Spohr composition. The performance was so spectacular that an uncle rewarded young Ole with his first adult-sized violin. The self-taught musician’s unusual playing style, memorialized in bronze on the north end of Loring Park, may be a result of countless wrestling matches with that grown-up violin. Ole Bull’s position was unorthodox: He held the violin with the brute strength of one thumb, not clasping it under the chin in the usual way. And that’s exactly how fellow Norwegian Jacob Fjelde sculpted him in 1897. A fierce realism permeates the piece, from the recently restored violin (with strings tightened to the same tension as a real violin and tuned to Bull’s preferred key) to a suit so detailed, according to U. of M. art history professor Karal Ann Marling, “you could practically cut a pattern just by looking at it.”

The thing about the sculpture is . . . well, it’s dull. Instead of seducing the attention, this bronze “Paganini of the North” stands there, stalwart, precise and sturdy. It belies Bull’s made-for-TV life: He struggled with gambling as a young man, masterminded an ill-fated colony for Norwegians in Pennsylvania (named Oleana, after himself), and all but abandoned two wives as he tootled across Europe, the Americas, and Africa. His adventures and virtuosity inspired cameos in works by Ibsen and Hans Christian Andersen. The musician in Longfellow’s “Tales of a Wayside Inn”—roughly an American Canterbury Tales—was a direct knock-off.

But this sculpture is so earnest you just don’t pick up on any of that. There’s no hint of metaphor, no rock star or satyr. Then again, that’s the paradox of great performers, isn’t it. Startlingly human, they’re capable of expressing the transcendent. It’s heartening that Minnesota’s first public sculpture doesn’t honor a deity or a virtue, but a real guy—and an artist at that. For sculpture more like TV, there’s always the legion of bubble-headed Charlie Browns in St. Paul. Or, for that matter, Minnesota’s newest public sculpture, Mary Richards on Nicollet Mall with her hat suspended right here between heaven and hell.