Twelve years ago a designer caught in a disaster zone might have been at a loss as to how to pitch in. But when the quakes hit Japan last month, it took very little time for the architects to rally. There were ready-made chapters in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto with access to a global network of nearly 5,000 volunteer design professionals, a template for crisis response and an online bank of designs, all relevant to post-crisis reconstruction and free to download. And joining all these dots was the only international humanitarian-oriented organisation to have pioneered design as a tool to fight disaster - Architecture for Humanity (AFH).
For the past month, AFH has been working to link the Japan Institute of Architects (JIA) and professional building associations with designers and donors across the world as they start the long process of rebuilding safe, sustainable housing and community structures; just as it has done in Christchurch and before that in northern Pakistan, coastal Sri Lanka, New Orleans and many other trouble spots across the globe.
Yet 12 years ago, AFH founder Cameron Sinclair was one of those lost designers. Disillusioned by an industry awash with star-struck developers and slick branding, he wanted to explore the 're-humanising' of architecture, and try to apply good design principles to communities in the tradition of legendary but long-gone modernists, such as Swiss architect Le Corbusier.
By 2005, US-based Sinclair and his wife, journalist Kate Stohr, had managed to persuade hundreds of architects to donate designs for mobile health clinics, transitional houses, and sports centres that doubled as HIV/Aids outreach facilities across the globe, such as the Khayelitsha Football for Hope Centre in South Africa. By 2007, these were uploaded onto an online Open Architecture Network for anyone to use for non-profit work; and designers were devising schools made of bottles, homes out of straw bricks; there was even an 'origami homeless shelter' made out of a single sheet by architecture student Yossi Steinberger for victims of the Sichuan earthquake (as seen on YouTube). It was the realisation of Sinclair's mission to 'design without ego', and a challenge to the idea that any prefabricated solution can be lumped on people hit by crisis or extreme poverty.
'The idea of using adaptation as opposed to repetition was a really big shift: saying, different neighbourhoods have different issues [so] adapt the building to that,' Sinclair says. 'With an architect you can create something the community wants, rather than something they just get given.'
But although AFH's reach was expanding, with local chapters springing up from Detroit to Dhaka, Sinclair found it had little control over the finished products. 'We were doing everything right: the projects would be thoughtful, with integrated stakeholders, [and] used the right materials and technologies,' he recalls. 'Then we'd hand it off and they'd just build crap.'
So a few years ago, AFH moved into construction management and started to fund itself. It sets up community advice centres, gives free design advice and creates programmes to boost construction standards by training local designers, masons and metalworkers. Before long, NGOs from Oxfam to Save the Children started asking to partner, as did Oprah Winfrey, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, Nike and the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa).
