An interview with Archinect's own Cameron Sinclair - on getting down and dirty and designing like you give a damn - appears in nothing less than New Scientist.
What would you do with $100,000? Buy a top-of-the-range Porsche? A yacht with all the trimmings? Not interested, says the man who has won just that at the Technology Entertainment Design conference, and been shortlisted for the UK's top design award. But then Cameron Sinclair is a rarity: an architect who involves the community he works for and learns from them. So "Design like you give a damn" is a fitting motto for the organisation he co-founded, Architecture for Humanity. It supplies people with long-term design and architecture ideas, from mobile HIV/AIDS clinics in Africa to quality shelters for people rebuilding their homes after disasters such as the Asian tsunami. As he told Maggie McDonald, getting down and dirty is what he likes best.

The Technology Entertainment Design prize sounds glamorous and elite. Why did you enter it?

I didn't. You're not allowed to, other people nominate you. I got a phone call while I was in Sri Lanka from Chris Anderson who runs the TED conference. His idea for the prize is that you get one wish. As a kid I never believed in wishes, but it's like having a genie: you can wish for anything. That is the real prize. The money is to help make that wish come true.

So what was your wish?

If there was an earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale in Los Angeles, maybe a dozen people would die and a couple of buildings collapse, but a 6 in the hillsides of Peru would kill tens of thousands because construction is technically poor. So I'm going to set up a community that will embrace and support sustainable and innovative housing for all. It will be a sort of global ideas exchange, a web that connects designers, engineers, planners, non-governmental organisations, research facilities, funding agents and, most importantly, local communities round the globe. If we are successful we could improve the living standards of at least 5 billion people, all of them prepared for potential natural disasters. I have amazing support - a wish manager called Amy Novograc - plus at least a year to work with the TED people and the big names at their conferences. Sun Microsystems has already committed to working with me.

How did you start out?

We started out in 1998 with $700, living and working in a one-room apartment. We had hundreds of volunteers raising money and doing projects at low cost. We had a dream of the future city, with lots of individual designs to suit individuals. There are also a million ways to solve the world's housing crisis. We've collected hundreds of innovative ideas, but they have not been tested. Architects tend to say: "I designed it, let's build it." But you can't play games with people who have lost so much.

So testing is a priority?

Right now we have three dozen designs that would be relevant for the Kashmir region. We could probably build enough for one small village but they need 500,000 houses. We have been testing ideas with individual designers and working with communities, but how do you scale up? That's the real challenge.

What's it like having NGOs as clients?

They are so overwhelmed on the emergency level that the transition to reconstruction is hard to bridge. Of course, there is no role for architects in emergencies. It was embarrassing when there were marauding bands of architects wandering Sri Lanka after the tsunami going from village to village asking for projects. They ended up disrupting the emergency process. The role of the architect has to be on a more long-term basis.

How do you bridge disaster and reconstruction?

One designer we support, Ferrera Design, came up with village shelters: they are 100 per cent recycled rigid cardboard, triple thick, fire and waterproof, cost about $300 and can be assembled in 45 minutes by two people with no tools - they snap together. The shelters last more than a year so people live in them while they rebuild. The point is that an active community drives rebuilding. In Sri Lanka, for example, 10 women who lost the families' breadwinners have virtually rebuilt their homes and started a business as a collective. Part of that is working out where the school or bakery go - that's real town planning!

What keeps you going?

My job title is eternal optimist. What keeps me going is seeing the strength of people who have lost everything. Some people I work with in Sri Lanka have lost 30 to 40 members of their family. They tell you how they spent the first five months pulling them out of the rubble and carrying them to a makeshift morgue. Yet when you begin to talk about renewal, you see that spark of hope in their eyes. They are so determined to rebuild that you become completely optimistic. What also keeps me going is building sustainable projects that have a life after we have gone. Many post-disaster projects get foreign workers to do the project and leave. Hiring locally is seen as a way to save money, but it empowers the community, helps develop new skills, transfers ownership and keeps funds with local families.

What about more everyday distress?

So many inner-city people emailed us saying they want to do local projects because there are serious issues of homelessness and a lack of basic education facilities. So we created an "open source" network, like the computer code model. We supply designs that are not protected by copyright and can be modified easily by local architects. We have a hundred or so architects in London, one of 153 global cities involved in "open source" architecture.

What's wrong with usual forms of architecture?

Architecture has become more and more marginalised as we have embraced the idea that we design for the elite. I had thought architecture was about creating a building in a community that not only improved the lives of those who used it but those who lived around it. But at architecture school it seemed we were more concerned about creating little jewels. When I qualified, I felt like the black sheep of the family. Is there anything wrong with designing for everyone?

How do you define being an architect?

If you strip away the ego and the hype, all we do is provide shelter. If you can't provide shelter, you can't call yourself an architect. The best architect in the world is Steve Kinsler and nobody has heard of him. He works for a small practice called East Coast Architects in Durban, South Africa, and has been working in KwaZulu Natal doing community centres and schools. They are beautiful, beautiful buildings and the process that he uses empowers the whole community. The level of the ownership of those buildings is so great that their maintenance costs next to nothing.

What about intellectual property rights?

This surprised me, but a designer in Denmark stopped a project for fear that another company would steal his ideas. Without copyright in the design, he feared his design could be exploited for profit. I've been working with the copyright reform group Creative Commons to refine how a designer and a developing nation's needs for innovative buildings can work.

Can architects really learn from local people?

I've learned more in villages and towns we've worked in than I ever learned at college. We have had over 7000 students in community-led events. They are going to be the next generation of architects.

Profile
UK-born Cameron Sinclair trained in London at the University of Westminster and the Bartlett School of Architecture. The work of Architecture for Humanity can be seen at London's Design Museum as part of the Designer of the Year exhibition. With the group's co-founder, Kate Stohr, he has written a book, Design Like You Give a Damn, profiling over 100 socially responsible projects (published by Thames and Hudson in May)