Architecture for Humanity co-founders Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair, in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. (Photo by Ian White.)

 

At 26-years-old, Cameron Sinclair was a self-acknowledged CAD monkey, grinding out blueprints for a New York architect. Ten years on, he’s now the design world’s big kid on the block. His thumbprint can seen in more than 104 countries, from Biloxi, Mississippi to far-flung Ugandan villages.

 

Sinclair co-founded Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that provides design services for communities suffering calamity — whether war, natural disaster or global pandemics. By creating and harnessing an online network of 40,000 architects and design professionals, Sinclair can organize relief projects instantly and ubiquitously, even while his organization manages the funding and blueprints from its headquarters in San Francisco.

 

In 2007, AFH broke all architectural precedents by open-sourcing its blueprints. Since then, the organization and its affiliates in 47 countries have uploaded some 4,000 designs, to be freely replicated by anyone around the world (openarchitecturenetwork.org).

 

This year, Sinclair has turned AFH’s sights to schools. According to the World Bank, basic education may be the best answer to a cluster of global crises. It’s been shown to improve family nutrition, immunization rates, and HIV prevention, among others. But education faces a serious logistical challenge, according to the bank: 10 million new classrooms are needed to accommodate the world’s exploding child population.

 

Sinclair is doing his best to assure that even in the poorest countries, those classrooms will be vibrant, well-designed learning environments, not just boxes for warehousing children. In the summer of 2009, AFH, completed a competition to conceptualize these classrooms of the future. From Ecuador to Iran, over 500 teams of schools and architects submitted designs that were inexpensive, sustainable and customized for each environment.

 

GlobalPost Passport talked with Sinclair about his vision and his life’s surprising arc.

 

Passport: How did Architecture for Humanity start?

 

Cameron Sinclair: In 1999 I was watching the Kosovo refugees on CNN, and I had this horrible feeling that I wasn’t doing anything real. I was designing big-ticket items for a high-end architecture firm, but it was soul destroying. So one day I called the United Nations’ general number, and said, “I’d like to talk to the guy in charge of refugees.”

 

A moment later someone picked up and said, “I’m the head of the UNHCR in New York. How can I help you?” I launched into this verbal diarrhea about the designing temporary housing for the refugees. There was a pause, and he said, “It’s a pretty good idea. Can your firm come to the U.N. and present to us?”

 

Passport: You’d just come out of university and had no “firm” to speak of.

 

Sinclair: I thank the planets for Sam Adams, because I used a six-pack to bribe some friends to pretend to be my associates at the U.N. It was arrogance to think that I could come up with a solution for this issue. But that night, I sat thinking with my partner and co-founder Kate Stohr, “I bet we’re not the only ones thinking that we can make a difference. I bet there hundreds — if not thousands — of design professionals who say that if they had the chance, they’d get involved too.” Within a few hours, we launched our first design competition. Sure enough six months later, 300 groups had submitted ideas.

 

Passport: Its sounds like designers came out of the woodwork. Where did they come from?

 

Sinclair: We started with 700 bucks and a website, but we had this massive boom with the birth of social networks. A journalist friend in New York once called Architecture for Humanity “al Qaeda for good.” The comment scared the shit out of me because we were in an auditorium full of potential donors — “Wanna donate to ‘al Qaeda for good?’”

 

He meant that we have sleeper cells all over the world, of architects and designers who want to make a difference. When something happens in their region they activate. When the cyclone hit Burma last spring, we started getting text messages from members in Rangoon. The Burmese weren’t letting [non-profit organizations] inside, but we didn’t need visas or flights. We already had locals in country and ready to go.

 

Passport: Last year AFH won the National Design Award, some would say the measure of success. How do you measure AFH’s success — number of projects?

 

Sinclair: We let AFH go viral, so actually I have no idea how many projects AFH has done in the world. At least 140. Chapters keep popping up — we have at least 80 — and each has its own projects. Quite frankly, I don’t care about numbers. I’m interested in absolute systemic change.

 

Passport: How so?

 

Sinclair: In the standard model after a disaster, you don’t have any designers. You have someone who’s been an accountant all his life in charge of housing, and he just imposes a cookie cutter solution that can be dehumanizing. I believe we can improve the lives of five billion people with a million different design solutions rather than getting a million architects to come up with one solution.

 

Before architects begin to design, we send them to live in these communities, so they can actually respond to the local wants. When Biloxi, Mississippi was wiped out after Katrina, the federal government arranged to put in FEMA trailers. The only thing was that they required water and power hookups. If the planners had been down there, they’d have known that that infrastructure was gone — there was no water or power. Thousands of these trailers have been left dormant over the border in Arkansas. Billions of tax dollars were used for a failed solution.

 

Passport: You were on the Gulf Coast. What was your solution?

 

Sinclair: This may be taboo to say, but we’ve taken third world ways of thinking and applied them here in America. I call it the leap back. We’re finding ingenuity in developing nations and we’re leaping them across the Atlantic.

 

Our first rule: don’t count on anyone. In Biloxi, we put together a group from across the community — rescue workers, community organizers, bankers, engineers, everyone — and started an organization to rebuild the community without a single federal grant. In less than three weeks we had $175,000. That turned to $15 million in less than a year. Today, we’ve designed 50 new homes, and rehabilitated 600. Most NGOs are still waiting for the federal money they’d applied for three years ago.

 

Passport: You’ve just turned your sights to classrooms. Why?

 

Sinclair: People don’t think of classrooms as an education problem. We can use classrooms as a teaching tool, instead of boxes.

 

I never had an architect come into my high school and show me what an architect was. I had to make it up as I went. But when 500 architects suddenly go into schools around the world, like we did this year, to show how architecture impacts lives, maybe we’ll have 1000 new architects for the next generation — and not just architects, architects who want to change the world.

 

Passport: What profound moments have had in your travels to sites around the world?

 

I’m a typical architect and don’t like any clutter, but I have some trinkets that mean a lot to me because they were given by a community. In the Amazon, I was given a wooden blowgun with darts, which I carried through [U.S. airport security] by the way — they were worrying about my metal belt buckle, not my poison darts. These are my plaques. In 40 years I can say to my grandkids, let me tell you the story behind this object. In it is a story that will hopefully inspire.
 

 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/newsmaker-interview/091029/cameron-sinclair-design-within-everyones-reach