Saving the world one building at a time

LISA ROCHON Saturday, January 13, 2008

Most of the world's architects are trained in the Western world, but most of the work that needs urgent doing is located in the developing world, especially areas ravaged by wars and natural disasters. Within these wastelands, there's a role for architects, though few dare to go there.

Cameron Sinclair, 34, is a California-based architect who is working to change the reality of the impoverished world, building by building. The organization he founded eight years ago, Architecture for Humanity (AFH), sounds awfully earnest, but its work is already making a difference. Between 2005 and 2007, AFH completed or funded 104 projects in 10 countries. And now the organization has about 8993 designers who share information and designs on a website called the Open Architecture Network. For his troubles, Sinclair has been catapulted from obscure AutoCAD monkey at a large firm in New York to become the Bono of humanitarian architecture.

Sinclair was inspired to start AFH with his wife, Kate Stohr, by stories about the Kosovo refugee crisis and the flattening of countless communities in the Balkan province. They started with a so-called office that consisted of Sinclair's laptop and cellphone parked on his desk at his day job in New York. Now, the couple works with six others in an office in Sausalito, and AFH has earned international awards and recognition. In 2004, Fortune magazine named Sinclair as one of the Aspen Seven, seven people who were changing the world for the better. Sinclair received the prestigious 2006 TED Prize (Toronto photographer Ed Burtynsky won the TED in 2005) that came with a rather useful $100,000 for demonstrating that his organization is having a positive impact on the planet.

Raised in the tough south London neighborhoods of Peckham and Bromley, Sinclair trained as an architect at the University of Westminster and the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London - an experience which he hated because of the way students would produce architecture as love-childs of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.

At AFH, Sinclair is the front man, and Stohr manages the massive and complicated job of fundraising. Surprisingly, construction donations come primarily from small family foundations and individuals interested enough to write $50 cheques. "We get more money from high school students selling hot chocolate and cookies than we do from corporations," Sinclair says.

That said, big organizations do help. Oprah Winfrey provided $1-million in forgivable loans through Oprah's Angel Network to help AFH build six new houses and renovate dozens of homes in East Biloxi, Miss., damaged by hurricane Katrina. Advanced Micro Devices, a computer chip company based in Austin, Tex., donated $250,000 to help cover construction and one year operating costs for  one of three winning designs to be selected for a health centre in Nepal, a youth centre in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, and a chocolate co-operative near Quito, Ecuador. Sinclair and Stohr are now out there raising funds for the other two.  Architects from around the world are competing to have their designs used on the projects; the winners will be selected Feb. 29.

Sinclair is an affable, easy-going sort who enjoys a good, long talk wherever he might be. Earlier this week he was travelling up the Amazon River to meet with villagers in Ecuador for whom AFH is designing the chocolate co-operative. "Chocolate farmers from 16 different villages in the Amazon want to use technology to sell their wares (directly to buyers) and use the profits to buy the land to preserve it from being exploited by oil exploration," says Sinclair. "It's a conservation project hidden under a chocolate factory."

By mid-week, Sinclair was in Toronto and at a café on Queen West to kick back before giving a standing-room-only lecture to a rapt audience at the Ontario College of Art and Design. But he's not talking about high-concept design.

"We're blurring what it is to be a designer," says Sinclair. "You can't do these projects with an ego." AFH has incorporated contributions from women in saris drawing their ideal village with chalk on a concrete floor. And from children recalling with clarity the way their village used to look before a tsunami wiped it out.

Sinclair scoffs at the minuscule steps that some large aid organizations take to help those in crisis. The ventilation flaps on an emergency tent supplied by the United Nations took some 20 years to realize, he says. In sharp contrast, the AFH designs are built efficiently, sensitive to site and culture. And they typically come with solar panels, rainwater collectors and dynamic roofs - not because it's sexy to talk about sustainability, but because nobody can afford to let anything go to waste. "We learned that community meetings are often created by dropping a $2.50 soccer ball on the floor. Within half an hour you have a hundred kids around you, and then the parents come by as well," says Sinclair. "And another thing we learned: Clean water and a bathroom in a school will double attendance."

It's difficult for a Canadian to imagine the kind of architecture that can be had for very little money in the developing world. Schools and women's collectives are typically built for $5.50 a square foot. They are tested for their durability. And a building that costs only $5,000 to erect can still be a beautiful space: For a school in Sri Lanka, the designs of peacocks and other local wildlife were featured in welded window screens; at a women's ceramic collective, pots were threaded over curved sections of rebar which supported the roof.

Sinclair speaks with passion about his projects, regaling an audience with instructive and funny anecdotes about his experiences. But his most cherished project, the one he talks most often about, is the Siyathemba Field of Hope in a rural area of South Africa called Somkhele. The product of an international design competition, the idea is to use sport to gather women, including the remarkably high numbers of teenagers who are HIV infected, encourage them to bond through soccer and provide, on or off the field, education about AIDS. The challenge comes not in designing a soccer field, but in designing change rooms that can be expanded to include a small community and health centre. FIFA, the international soccer federation, is poised to fund the construction of 20 soccer fields and adjacent health centres throughout sub-Saharan Africa - the facilities, says Sinclair, are expected to be completed in time for the 2010 World Cup to be held in South Africa.

Too many junior architects - called associates - are relegated to drawing lines on computers. It's soul-numbing work, even for the most ambitious, long-sighted designer. Sinclair points to the kind of responsibility that he likes to give to architecture graduates and qualified architects - that they can lead a project that could truly help 25,000 people if only they were to give six months of their time. Sinclair also wants large firms to shoulder some responsibility for the mega-buildings they're designing. "Right now it's a fad to speak about our environmental footprint, but what we need to talk about is our ethical footprint," he says. "And, if you're doing a building in Dubai and you see how the workers are being treated in inhumane ways - where they are driven out to the desert for several months ... and put into indentured service ... you have a responsibility to the people who are building the building."

With that in mind, he's hoping to put pressure on large international consultants to flex their corporate muscles in the Middle East and China and insist on decent standards of living for construction workers. Once a year, Architecture for Humanity launches an international design competition. "It's a way for huge numbers of people to get inspired," Sinclair says. New alliances and firms are formed. Gillilandtolila, a collaboration between an architect working for Dutch superstar Rem Koolhaas and an engineer working for the remarkable French architect Jean Nouvel, grew out of a competition project they had worked on for AFH. Their studio was awarded the design for the Napuli Centre of Excellence, which started out as a birthing centre for a remote community in Tanzania. Pregnant women had to walk or be carried in wheelbarrows some 40 kilometres to the nearest medical facility, often resulting in death of either the mother or the unborn child along the way.

After consulting the community, Gillilandtolila decided to create a medical training centre in rural Tanzania that educates midwives. The centre is now under construction, and the young European designers have traveled several times to Tanzania to complete their work. Funding for the $145,000 centre has come from Architecture for Humanity and from other sources.

A couple facts to leave you with: In 2008, one in seven people are living in unplanned favelas or refugee camps. And, sorry, it's not going to get any better. Thirty years from now, one in three people will be living on the extreme urban fringe. If that is to change, architects will have to become gutsy and unafraid about the role they can play. If only you could bottle the humanism of Cameron Sinclair and make everybody drink it. Urbanity might be a sweeter, more palatable place.