There is a growing community of architects, most of them young, that is opting to withdraw from the race to design the most prestigious company headquarters, the most luxurious holiday resort or the world’s highest skyscraper and instead is turning its attention to a far greater challenge: that of creating decent shelter fit for human beings for the world’s over one billion homeless, whether victims of natural disasters, civil war refugees or slum dwellers.
Leading players driving the movement include American architect Cameron Sinclair and his wife, journalist Kate Stohr, whose organisation Architecture for Humanity is behind the publication of Design Like you Give a Damn. In the introductory pages, Sinclair describes his own career, which follows a similar pattern to so many of the activists from the world of development aid and disaster relief: a profound vocational identity crisis (“I found myself designing lipstick dispensers for a store in a place where the average weekly salary was equal to the price of one lipstick”), a socially committed mentor and a life-changing trip to a needy region (HIV/AIDS-ridden South Africa) culminated in the formation of an organisation that initially spread its message primarily through staging exhibitions and architecture competitions.
In Design Like You Give A Damn, Sinclair and Stohr document the development of emergency shelter and interim homes over the past century, or more precisely since the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and the underlying conditions in which these came into being. But first and foremost they look at present-day approaches to the problem, in an age where statistics documenting humanitarian and natural disasters are published with greater rapidity than ever before. Media interest in the wake of humanitarian disasters is not always an objective yardstick, as on-going situations that drive aid organisations to the limits of their capability such as long, drawn-out civil wars, droughts or the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, are often far more devastating in their effect than the earthquakes or floods that capture news headlines. Design Like You Give a Damn clearly illustrates the wide variety of guises taken by architecture for the needy, ranging from tent cities erected by UNHCR through to a sleeping bag donation scheme for the homeless in Baltimore, and from a women’s shelter in Senegal to the Rural Studio buildings erected in southern Alabama. The book features a number of interviews conducted by the editors with the protagonists of humanitarian architecture about their experiences.
Their answers elicit both admiration and disillusionment, illustrating just how much even individuals on restricted budgets can achieve but at the same time outlining the magnitude of the hurdles that have to be overcome. Red tape and corruption join forces with logistical problems and cultural divides. Consequently, the prefabricated onefits- all solutions that were thought to apply across cultural boundaries are now on the decline, even in the lowest house building price bracket, and construction concepts using local resources – both human and material – appear to have become the key to success.
Although wishing Design Like You Give A Damn the broadest possible readership, there is no denying that this in itself will not achieve anything. As one development aid worker put it, “We don’t need your awareness, we need your support!”. If this appeal is to be taken seriously, it entails a total rethink on the part of the architectural community. The victims frequently understand better what is needed than the self-acclaimed experts.
Clean drinking water rather than windows, for instance, or jobs rather than paved walkways. Which begs the question of the extent to which architects are needed as designers in this type of project. In answering this question, architect Maurice D. Cox from Charlottesville, instigator of the highly regarded Bayview Rural Village humanitarian settlement project on the east coast of the USA, sets out the quintessential argument of the entire book: “We need to be in the places where problems exist. We have to be in the room when the decisions are being made to be able to voice our opinions. Then our talents will be exploited. That’s how you get design to be important. Designers need to be engaged, to be civic leaders, to be in the right place at the right time.”