“Seven dollars per square foot,” says Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity, as we walk into the organization’s headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. A conscientious contractor, he can still name the volunteers who put in the work, donating flooring, lighting, and sweat for the frugal 5,000-square-foot build-out. “We paid them in beer and pizza.”
When the nonprofit organization made the move across the Bay from Sausalito, Calif., to downtown San Francisco in 2007, Cameron Sinclair—a self-declared “chief eternal optimist”—was already a rising star. Maybe even one of the most famous humanitarians in the world, and certainly so within the closed circuit of cause-oriented architecture. Still, Architecture for Humanity employed only a half-dozen full-time staffers, and for all the attention Sinclair received, the organization still felt its mission was misunderstood.
“The rude awakening was that many people saw us as this do-gooder organization,” Sinclair says. “The reality is that we’re a design/build firm with a robust practice.”
It’s doubtful that even Sinclair knows exactly what all Architecture for Humanity does. At a glance, the organization coordinates architects in regions where their services are scarce or distressed. Architecture for Humanity promotes a broad network of young professionals through its design fellowship program and chapter organizations. Through this outreach network—and the requests for proposals it fields for clients as well as collaborations with other for-profit and nonprofit firms—Architecture for Humanity marshalls architectural services for communites struck by conflict, natural disasters, and deficits in resources. And that’s just for starters.
In the 12 years since the organization took root, in 1999, in a 300-square-foot New York apartment shared by Sinclair and Kate Stohr, Architecture for Humanity has grown. Its San Francisco office employs 36 full-time staffers and manages a small army of volunteers—teams that work to alleviate poverty, build community, and address climate change among at-risk populations. The organization has 17 staffers in Haiti alone. Yet it also declines 70 percent of the projects it is pitched—it just can’t get to them.
With its dramatic growth has come a substantive change to the kind of work Architecture for Humanity performs. Sinclair and cofounder Kate Stohr don’t believe that the measure of Architecture for Humanity’s performance is in how much architecture they’ve built for humanity, but by more elusive standards. It’s a view shared by one of their major funders.
“We’re hoping to provide the resources to Haiti to try to create sustainable opportunities for development,” says Veronica Selzler, program advocacy specialist for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. The work always seems incomplete. “We’re investing in the long term. We’re investing in programs that won’t need us, ultimately.”
Today, Architecture for Humanity’s bailiwick is as much building loans as building clinics. The organization is looking to assert design as a framework for development for areas that lack even infrastructure. In Haiti, this effort will be measured not in numbers of houses built but in the success or failure of Port-au-Prince as a city. Which means that Architecture for Humanity’s mission is flexible, experimental, and—quite often and for reasons outside its control—seemingly destined to fail.
The mission begins at the vanishingly narrow intersection between design and philanthropy. “There are people who are really good at writing grants and who are terrible at implementing projects. There are people who are fantastic at building projects that have no idea how to write a grant—mainly because they’ve never had to do it before,” Sinclair says. “It kills us when we see someone who’s spent five years, they do a Kickstarter campaign, they do this, they do that, and they finally scrape together $5,000 to do a project—where we could have brought in a public-private partnership and had $50,000 right on the go.”
The way wasn’t always so clear to Sinclair, of course. The Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake off the coast of Indonesia and subsequent tsunami “was the moment we realized we were an organization,” he says. Before the first wave of the tsunami had hit India, Sinclair and Stohr had made contact with local architects there. Sinclair wrote a blog post on Worldchanging, a nonprofit webzine devoted to sustainability, in the hopes of raising $10,000 over the next six months. Within 72 hours, the fledgling Architecture for Humanity organization had mobilized teams on the ground to assess damage and start rebuilding efforts—and surpassed its fundraising goals. By the spring, Sinclair and Stohr had raised half a million dollars.
The experience cemented a few of Architecture for Humanity’s core rules. Always work with a locally licensed architect on each and every built project. Build to code, even if it means building the only legal structure in an area (which has been the organization’s experience in one Kenyan slum). The organization often sends teams to slums, but never to sites with active conflicts. Where Google says, “Don’t be evil,” Architecture for Humanity says, “Don’t work with assholes.”
The tsunami also introduced Architecture for Humanity to the pitfalls it faces with every project. “There are a lot of missed opportunities,” Stohr says, describing the pace of rebuilding. “There’s also a lot of poor journalism. You find that journalists are setting the expectations. You have the media saying, ‘Why aren’t we rebuilding?’ one year after—which they do after every disaster.”
“A big surprise was that to allow solid sustainable community building to happen, we had to be the bank,” Sinclair says. “We had to be the developer—which is what we are now.”
When it is up to Architecture for Humanity to determine which projects to support, the organization finds itself having to decide between proposals to alleviate suffering in post-conflict or post-disaster states. How do you choose? Sinclair doesn’t hesitate. “It sucks.”
On Tour With Cameron
This month, Cameron Sinclair’s schedule takes him to Taiwan, Japan, Chicago, and Santa Fe, N.M. He says that for any given month, he spends two weeks in San Francisco and two weeks away. His calendar doesn’t support that claim. Most weeks and weekends are blocked off in bright colors, indicating travel.
A lot of Sinclair’s work happens on the road; Stohr spends more time at headquarters. Sinclair is quick to point out that he and Stohr share duties and deserve credit equally.
Not long after the organization’s founding, though, Sinclair became synonymous with Architecture for Humanity. Fortune magazine gave him his first big break in 2004 when they named him as one of the Aspen Seven, a global group of avatars fighting for good. The World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader in 2008. In May, the U.S. Agency for International Development appointed Sinclair to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid Members, a consortium that includes executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Sinclair’s biggest hit came in 2006, when he was awarded the TED Prize, an honor typically reserved for the likes of former President Bill Clinton and benevolent rock-god Bono. Around this time, being Cameron Sinclair became one of Sinclair’s chief responsibilities at Architecture for Humanity—which is one reason he signed with Los Angeles talent agency Creative Artists Agency.
“That was a really hard thing for me to do,” he says. “Part of speaking is advocacy and to get people to understand our role in this. But the other half is to bring in funding. What I found is, I spent a year on the road, talking to everybody. At the end of these talks, with hundreds of people in the room, I would say, ‘Look. We just need a contribution.’ Nothing. I was actually losing money, flying to somebody’s event, giving a talk, and nobody donating.”
Sinclair puts his considerable personal charm to work for the organization. Minus the agency’s cut, all his speaking fees go to Architecture for Humanity; so do proceeds from the sales of Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, co-edited by Sinclair and Stohr and published by Metropolis Books in 2006. These engagement fees support executive salaries at Architecture for Humanity—including salaries for the co-founders, both of whom receive $96,000, according to public records, and other staff. The average salary for a nonprofit executive was roughly $150,000 in 2008, according to a 2010 compensation study by Charity Navigator.
“There’s a couple of people [who came to work] here because of the book,” Sinclair says. Design Like You Give a Damn Vol. 2 is due in April 2012. With that book, Sinclair and Stohr hope to answer the questions they get most frequently: How do you fund projects? “Kate’s been looking at the history of funding over the last 20 years and how it’s changed, looking at for-profit mechanisms versus nonprofit mechanisms. If we were smart, we could have done a book every year. And here’s another set, and here’s another set, and here’s another set.”
If the public persona is a necessary evil, it is one that has redounded to the benefit of Architecture for Humanity. Sinclair’s global fame and familiarity with architectural bigwigs in Japan led advisors to former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan to call him for reconstruction advice following the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan.
“We tend to fund the cracks in the crisis,” Sinclair says. In Japan, Architecture for Humanity’s work is diverse. The organization identified a traditional wood joint mechanism that performed well in the earthquake and is working with Fukushima carpenters to implement this design in reconstruction work. For a remote fishing village called Miami—which was wiped out by the tsunami—Architecture for Humanity is not providing design services, but rather helping the town decide whether it’s even worth rebuilding. The larger part of the work in Japan, though, which Sinclair oversees, involves cooperating with donors and insurers to establish a forgivable loan mechanism for small businesses for reconstruction and operations.
“It’s not typical of a pro-bono design firm,” he says. “But if you’ve got a mom-and-pop business that’s been there for three generations, there’s no way they can get financing to bring their business back.”
Sinclair claims credit for the phrase “build back better”—a favorite recovery mantra of President Clinton and countless others. While it’s hard to judge that claim, the URL, in any case, belongs to Architecture for Humanity: buildbackbetter.com, a website written in Japanese, calls for one-page proposals for reconstruction grants of $25,000 to $60,000 for projects in Japan.
“We’re like legal aid. If you don’t have an architect, one will be appointed to you,” Sinclair says. “If you’re not happy with the architect you’ve got, we’ll find you one.”
Behind the Scenes With Kate
In his 2008 book, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, Matthew Bishop, the New York bureau chief for The Economist, outlines a model—or perhaps a plea—for reconstruction. It’s one that would get its test in Haiti. Traditional aid is wasteful, or perilously slow, Bishop observes. Earlier this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that, of the $1.14 billion in aid that Congress allocated for Haiti in 2010, just $184 million has been committed to date. Bishop has noted that government models for aid are often adequate for relief efforts, but endorses the private sector for performing reconstruction, for which entrepreneurial interests can carry enthusiasm after public interest fades.
From Stohr’s perspective, choosing between public and private aid isn’t any choice at all.
“The international community has failed Haiti in some very significant ways,” Stohr says. “I’ll speak with U.S. AID representatives and they’re only doing housing. For the love of God. You’re just going to do housing in a place that needs everything?”
If Sinclair is the organization’s optimist, Stohr would be its cynic, the straight-man in the routine. She is, anyway, the only figure at Architecture for Humanity headquarters who has an office—where she manages the often byzantine contracting process that is Architecture for Humanity’s favored tool. A manila folder three inches thick containing a contract for a project in Haiti sits in a bin of manila folders stacked a foot tall under a sign reading, FOR KATE TO READ.
“To date, we are involved in seven master-planning projects in Haiti. For such a tiny firm, that is ridiculous,” she says.
Stohr, who directs Architecture for Humanity’s work in Haiti, defends the pace of reconstruction there. “In Haiti’s case, they’re off pace. But they’re only off pace by about four months,” she explains. “The reason that they’re off pace is that they’re putting a lot more into it in terms of trying to build communities. It’s not that you want to be slow. But you do want to build water-treatment systems.”
As Stohr explains, there are two primary problems with reconstruction in Haiti. (Problems beyond, say, cholera.) The first is a fundamental misunderstanding of the crisis and how it affects development: It wasn’t the earthquake that made the state dysfunctional. “If we were building in a post-conflict environment, no one would be surprised that we’re still struggling with land title,” Stohr says. “Here we are building in a disaster context, and they [critics] have forgotten that Haiti is also a post-conflict environment.”
The second is fragmentation: Reconstruction spending is typically earmarked for particular sectors, such as sanitation, and dispersed by and to subject-matter experts with little coordination between them.
“There are very few people who can tie that into a comprehensive community development project,” she says. “Of which we are one. But we are only one.”
Stohr cites Walter Kiechel’s 2010 corporate history, The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, as influential to her thinking with regard to Haiti. The book documents the invention in the 1960s of corporate strategy as we understand it today. “Looking at Haiti, I thought it would be interesting, since there was so much rampant disregard for building code whatsoever—I thought, maybe if I could get in there early enough with enough people, I could get a larger market share, then we could set the standard,” Stohr says. “Which is a crazy idea”—Architecture for Humanity establishing the precedent, instead of, say, U.S. AID.
Architecture for Humanity always seeks to work with local architects. “You don’t take away from the architects who are there,” Stohr says, “otherwise you’re distorting the market and competing with them.” In Haiti, the organization is working with literally all of the country’s architects to redesign six commercial corridors in Port-au-Prince. “There are only 30 architects in Haiti,” Stohr says.
It is another way to “fund the cracks in the crisis,” as Sinclair puts it: By investing now in the commercial corridors of Port-au-Prince, Architecture for Humanity hopes to prevent the housing projects funded by government agencies such as U.S. AID from turning into slums. U.S. government spending is largely prescribed for creating housing, but mortgages are bound to end in default if no markets exist to create income stability. This is a looming threat in places such as Port-au-Prince, where unemployment hovers at 90 percent.
Working in the philanthrocapitalist vein outlined by Matthew Bishop, Architecture for Humanity has used population-overlay data provided by Digicel, the Caribbean’s largest mobile telecommunications company, to identify 400 small businesses and begin work to secure loans for them. These loans come with an asterisk: The rebuilding work must be performed by one of the local, licensed architects, and Architecture for Humanity reviews the drawings. Only two banks offer loan products for the work Architecture for Humanity has in mind, Stohr says, and the organization will need to secure between 30 and 100 of them, she estimates, to reach a scale that is feasible.
When does the building happen? Architecture for Humanity has to convince Haiti first. Though the nation’s dozens of architects recently reinstated a professional architectural trade association (“a huge step forward,” Stohr says), Haitians still look to masons for building services.
“We are starting a massive consumer campaign,” Stohr says. “A radio campaign and billboards. ‘Get Help Rebuilding—Come to the Rebuilding Center.’ We’ve never done billboards in our life.”
Rebuilding Jobs in Haiti
At Architecture for Humanity headquarters, the office gathers for a weekly ideas lunch and presentation. On the Friday I visited in August, 20 or so staffers listen in on Architecture for Humanity program manager Sandhya Naidu Janardhan’s update on the progress in Haiti.
After receiving her master’s degree at Columbia University, Janardhan worked for India’s InFORM Architects before joining Architecture for Humanity’s design fellowship program in 2008. Stationed in Hyderabad, India, in 2009, she worked to build some 10 low-cost primary healthcare clinics in six months. As the point on Haiti since June 2010, on any given day Janardhan will coordinate between representatives of, say, Ben Stiller’s family foundation, the Haitian government, and Architecture for Humanity’s staff in the field.
“I am someone who is the bridge between Haiti and here,” she says after her presentation. Sinclair describes her role more admiringly: “She is the single biggest threat to my job.”
Janardhan’s presentation focuses on the Haiti Rebuilding Center, the locus of Architecture for Humanity’s job-building and job-training effort. There, Architecture for Humanity’s growing staff—17 full-time staffers aided by some 20 volunteers—runs the organization’s school construction initiative, commercial-corridor revitalization program, and technical assistance efforts. In eight years’ time, she explains, the center will be wholly locally run.
The center’s impact isn’t always quantifiable. There’s masonry training for contractors once a week. Staff there recently offered a workshop on collaborative design for girls. They were ready for as many as 40 girls by the 10 a.m. start and expected about 10 to show up. By 10:30, the center had a queue of 200 girls. A sign of enthusiasm for the center’s work, many of the girls made a long trek from outlying refugee camps to get there.
Architecture for Humanity’s Haiti school initiative is one of the first projects to show the sort of tangible results that people might expect to see. One school is now complete; five more (of a total of 10) are under construction. Janardhan prefers to measure results by people, not buildings: She says the schools will serve 3,000 students and employ 100 teachers and 40 staff.
In terms of buildings, the biggest results will come in the form of a collaborative enterprise with Habitat for Humanity: the Santo Community Development Plan, a $15 million permanent shelter community just outside Léogâne, the wrecked epicenter of the January 2010 earthquake. The greenfield development will consist of 500 homes, designed to house 1,000 displaced families—who are still camped out in the region, awaiting relief.
This is not just a Habitat project, but the Habitat project, says Mark Andrews, vice president of Habitat for Humanity’s Haiti Recovery program. While the organization is conducting 12 other reconstruction projects in Haiti, Santo is by far the most visible and capital intensive.
“One of the many unique things about this project is that not only will we be building 500 houses in this community, the first 150 will be built within two weeks, in November,” Andrews says. The Léogâne site will serve as the 2011 Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, with the former president and first lady visiting in November, marking it as Habitat for Humanity’s biggest single event globally this year.
But Architecture for Humanity’s biggest impact in Haiti won’t be measured by buildings, or even in this decade, says Eric Cesal, Architecture for Humanity’s regional program manager in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, he is working to identify businesses to anchor each of the six commercial corridors the organization is developing—a 25-year project. “Some of these places employed 100 people,” he says. “Now they don’t employ anyone.”
Architecture for Humanity has retained the services of a third-party monitoring and evaluation firm to track this stimulus effort. It may take longer still to measure the success of the broad, general effort to confirm what architecture can actually do for Haiti.
“One of the reasons that disaster disproportionately affects the poor is because their buildings aren’t built as well,” Cesal says. “In an environment of poverty, people don’t have access to professional design services. Where that happens over decades, the role of architecture and engineering is psychologically divorced from buildings. You just get your cousin to do it or the guy down the street.”
Not if Architecture for Humanity can help it. One of the snottier services the organization provides in Haiti is that of pro-bono regional tattletale. As staff perform site surveys, Stohr says, they’re on the look out for shoddy construction. When they see it, they leave behind a kit of materials, and try where they’re able to notify the project’s funder. Then they price the fixes.
“Reconstruction is only really starting,” Cesal says, “and Haitian architects are going to be busy for years to come.” They knew from the onset of the crisis what their role would be, he explains; many of them set to work studying seismic code in the aftermath of the earthquake. “It’s not like California, where it’s built into the collective psyche. Hurricanes, absolutely. Haitian engineers know that and how to get around it.”
The Roadmap
On any given Friday that they’re both in the Bay Area, Sinclair and Stohr, who are married, meet at a Sausalito, Calif., bar with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Over hard cider and ginger beer, the three of us talk about the familiar nonprofit routine: hustling for money.
In December 2010, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund awarded Architecture for Humanity $816,472, a substantial grant toward the Haiti Rebuilding Center. That is the closest that Architecture for Humanity has come to support from the U.S. government for its work in Haiti.
“I have sat in countless meetings with AID officials, World Bank officials,” Stohr says. “You think the alphabet soup of architecture is bad,” Sinclair picks up. “At the U.N., you can go through a 20-minute meeting without a real word being spoken.” Stohr continues. “When it comes down to it, fundamentally, they do not invest in place. It’s very difficult for us to get the kind of flexible funding we need to do this work from those kinds of agencies.”
Architecture for Humanity has performed baseline market measures for hundreds of businesses in Haiti, demonstrating “the value of strengthening Haiti’s capacity rather than just rebuilding,” says the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s Selzler. Both Selzler and Sinclair recognize that some solutions would result in more obvious returns. “You don’t see us flying in shipping containers anywhere, or pre-fab solutions,” Sinclair says. “It’s not that they might not work—it’s that they don’t hire locally.”
To develop the loan program, Stohr needs $2 million—by October. That’s approximately the amount that Architecture for Humanity reported in total revenues for 2009. She says that she has $1 million committed; for the rest, Architecture for Humanity will tap private donors and foundations, its traditional supporters. Though U.S. AID is sympathetic to the mission, she says, the agency is committed to funding housing exclusively.
But housing without market stability—both in terms of income for residents and reasonable risk for investors—may lead to widespread default and slums. “Once you put in that capital, it’s all private market. You’re just opening door to private market investment,” Stohr says. “And local investment! I’m not talking about foreign direct investment, I’m just talking about creating the stability that the banks need to lend locally.”
The organization has made one significant acquisition that it hopes will help to expand its network: Architecture for Humanity has acquired Worldchanging—a sustainable design site that Wired described as “the most important website on the planet.” Architecture for Humanity will merge Worldchanging with its open-source Open Architecture Network in a relaunch to promote transparency in design.
Perhaps to a surprising degree, Architecture for Humanity’s rapid growth has not changed the way the organization works at an atomic level. It is dependent in large part on individual and family foundations and the design industry for its support; fundraising still happens over discussions of individual project goals and designs. At the core of every donation and every design fellowship is a commitment to the idea that architecture can improve people’s lives. For the designers who commit their time, it’s not a side project.
“You can’t just come in for a weekend charrette and say that you helped Katrina,” Sinclair says. “You gotta be there. You have to be hand in hand with whoever you’re partnering with to get it done.”
Note: Architecture for Humanity has not received federal support specifically for its operations in Haiti. The text has been updated to reflect this clarification.