Rebuild Like You Give a Damn

Wired.com
Issue 13.03 - March 2005
WIRED magazine

Rebuild Like You Give a Damn

The flip side of disaster is a fresh start - at least for those lucky enough to survive. Cameron Sinclair founded Architecture for Humanity in 1999 to help apply innovative design to humanitarian crises. Its motto: "Design like you give a damn." Run on a shoestring budget and a donated laptop, the nonprofit's main asset is its 1,200 volunteer architects organized online through Meetup in 130 cities worldwide. Projects include refugee resettlement in Kosovo, clinics for AIDS patients in Africa, and temporary housing in hurricane-trashed Grenada. Cash donations to the agency have been earmarked to build a model fishing community where a Sri Lankan village was wiped out in December by the tsunami. Also on the group's 2005 agenda: an online design competition called Rethinking Tent City.

WIRED: Designer refugee camps and fishing villages? Sounds like overkill.
SINCLAIR: That's emphatically not what we're about. For every Frank Gehry putting up gorgeous monuments, there are a hundred architects focused on improving ordinary peoples' lives. But they don't get on the covers of magazines - they're the lost children of architecture.

How do you tsunami-proof a fishing village?
There's no way - nothing you'd want to live in is going to stand up to a wall of water hitting your house at 200 mph. But we think better design can help people build stronger, sustainable communities.

Meanwhile, people living near the Bay of Bengal don't have roofs over their heads.
Unfortunately, they're ending up in tents. It's the same idea as always: Put up as much canvas as possible as fast as possible. Tents are great for a couple of weeks. But the reality is that the average refugee spends three to five years in a camp. They need something that allows them to transition back to their original lives, maybe even something that will be permanent.

What does that look like?
Something more than a tent, but less than a permanent house. One example is the Global Village Shelter, a flat-pack hut made from a kind of water- and fireproof cardboard. It costs about $400 and can withstand 60 to 80 mph winds. Two people can put one together in 15 minutes.

Cheap, cookie-cutter TVs, computers, and cars are everywhere - why not houses?
That's called tract housing. It's not going to help the developing world. The less money you have, the more you need something that's going to last.

So, what's the answer?
Show people what can be done if you apply smart design that really takes account of peoples' needs. We also want to co-opt advances in technology - solar panels, recycled materials - and infuse them into communities that traditionally have not been leading-edge.

Blueprints are a kind of software. Is open source design an option?
A dream of ours is to develop a searchable database of designs, sorted by location, by environmental issues, by architect. I've jokingly called it the Open Source Architecture Network. We're already working with Creative Commons on ways to make designs available free around the world. If any Wired readers want to pitch in, we're all ears.

- Spencer Reiss

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