Design Within Reach: Architecture for Humanity Builds the Future of Housing

Written by Jeff Muckensturm

Architecture for Humanity has a clear goal: to improve the lives of billions people worldwide, one sustainable building at a time. And while the mission may sound overly ambitious, AFH is on its way. The group, which has become the premier nonprofit organization for disaster relief housing programs, has already helped build earthquake-resistant shelters in Turkey, refugee housing in Afghanistan, and school buildings in Calcutta.

AFH's success, however, can be bittersweet. After 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami, donations began pouring in, transforming something co-founder Cameron Sinclair, a San Francisco-based architect, started in 1999 during his spare time into a multi-million dollar organization. "Every time we've had a natural disaster, we gain another thousand people," Sinclair says.

Success also grew a problem: "People were writing about AFH, and how pioneering we were," says Sinclair, 33. "But behind the scenes we were frustrated because we had projects in eight different countries, we had architects working on similar issues, but nobody could share knowledge."

Then in 2006, AFH won the prestigious TED Prize—which grants recipients a wish to help save the world. Sinclair was already brewing a pioneering idea. "I knew what we wanted to do... build a global, open source network where architects, governments, and nongovernmental organizations can share and implement design plans to house the world..." he said. "One solution is, let's just make the same chicken coop box and replicate it, stick vinyl siding on it and make people live in it... On the other hand, we can empower communities to come up with their own designs."

And the Open Architecture Network (OAN) was born.

The OAN web site—an "online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design" -- allows architects to share their creations with other OAN members, resulting in the amassing of collective design knowledge from a crowd, otherwise known as crowdsourcing.

In the crowdsourced world of OAN, participants can swap, borrow, adapt, or adopt plans by uploading them. Each project is allotted up to 10 megabytes of space to upload a description, information, photos, and CAD files. The search and calendar functions allow visitors to find projects they're interested in by status (completed, in construction, design complete, design development), location, and theme (historic preservation, mixed use, flood resistant, etc.). Contributors uneasy with sharing their work can keep their projects private until they're ready to expose them to the world.

Even the software powering the site -- designed by Sun Microsystems -- is open source: the Drupal content management system chosen by thousands of nonprofits for its ease of use. "Sun Microsystems said, 'This needs to be sustainable, so if you're building an open source network, why not make the website open source itself?'" Sinclair told TreeHugger Radio. "So not only can architects contribute ideas, but computer architects can contribute revisions to the system."

When the site was unveiled in February 2007, more than 100 projects were uploaded. Today, over 3,700 volunteer designers working on about 217 different projects—including designs for projects ranging from an orphanage in Sri Lanka to upgrades for the art space ABC No Rio in New York City -- are sharing their ideas with a rapidly expanding membership.

This kind of crowdsourcing implodes the trickle-down model of design, where architects are the experts, imposing their visions on the clients, and where developing nations rely on the West's expertise to solve their housing crises. The majority of OAN members are not from the U.S., according to Sinclair, and those from developing nations can share their expertise with others.

Sinclair calls this "leap back." "Leap back is when inventions are created in the developing world and we repurpose them in a first world setting," he says. So if an architect in Indonesia designs an innovative flood resistant structure, he or she could earn income by selling it to flood-prone areas of the U.S.

But why would architects -- sometimes portrayed as an egotistical lot -- give their designs away? Because, Sinclair said, the humanitarian element is missing from most design practices. "I'm sitting here designing hotel doorknobs when I could be doing something that actually made a difference in people's lives," he said. "We want to give stuff to the developing, to the poor, to the nonwestern world. We're not talking about a western solution."

Another draw to the site is that the OAN gives designers the opportunity to see their ideas actually get built. "Often designs go unrealized," said Kate Stohr, co-founder of AFH. "For a typical firm, something like eight or nine out of 10 projects never make it to construction."

And they don't have to surrender complete control of their designs to see them realized. OAN partnered with Creative Commons—a nonprofit that helps change a copyright from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved" -- because Sinclair believes the "all or nothing" copyright system limits designers. "If I came up with a house design and I know there's a grave housing need in India, I'd want to be able to give it away because I can affect more people. But I don't want to give away my intellectual property away completely. So the some rights reserved are very relevant," he explained.

AFH was the first to license a building design -- a youth center/HIV clinic in South Africa--under Creative Commons, which has created seven licenses, used by all of the designs on the OAN, that range from "Public Domain" (free for nonprofit purposes) to "Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives" (can't be changed and requires attribution to the creator).

It also allows designers to alter design plans found on OAN to fit their specific needs, something that couldn't be done under normal copyright laws. "[Designers] can adapt projects to climatic differences, to the cultural differences, to the religious differences, to all the things that make a building what it is. It's about localization. It's not about projects made for modular replication, which usually fail cause they don't take into account localization," said Sinclair.

Projects can evolve and change into something the original designer may not have conceived, but still is credited for creating. "Your design idea lives on longer than you," said Sinclair. "It's not about who's living in my design now. It's about what are future generations doing with my design."

Take AFH's Biloxi Model Home Project, an emergency housing response to Hurricane Katrina. It includes housing designs sensitive to local needs and culture as well as input from the community that would eventually live in them. The project includes flood-resistant materials and building methods that could be adapted in other parts of the Gulf Coast, or other flood-prone areas around the world.

A form of crowdsourcing itself, the project -- a joint effort of the Biloxi Relief Recovery and Revitalization Center, the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio of Mississippi State University, and AFH -- invited 12 architects to submit designs for single-family homes that met FEMA's new building codes, including guidelines to lift all houses up to 12 feet off the ground. In August 2006, the participating designers traveled to Biloxi for an open house, where the community chose its favorites.

"What surprised me the most was the choices the families made in terms of design," said Stohr. "They were downright avant-garde." The Porchdog house, for example, includes a cantilevered deck roof with exposed joists and customizable interior.

Marlon Blackwell Architects designed the Porchdog house for the Tyler family -- headed by Richard Tyler, a house painter and single father of two. But once the design is complete, the plans, including CAD files, will be available on OAN for other communities, Gulf Coast and elsewhere, to use.

So far, the Porchdog house is the only one that has been replicated -- at least digitally. Clear Ink, a digital marketing company, found the Porchdog design on OAN, and asked Blackwell if they could create a 3D rendering of the plans in the online community Second Life. The result provides a sense of the finished home's scale and gives exposure to the project. Clear Ink also set up a virtual donation center to allow Second Life users to support the project; the money is real, even if the house isn't.

The real test of OAN's success is yet to come: Will designs be adopted and copied and shared in real life, too? Can it really make a dent in the living standards of five billion people, one in seven of whom live in slums?

Judging from the amount of buzz so far -- indicated by AFH's extensive donations and high-profile colleagues, like Oprah's Angel Network -- OAN's future looks promising. But convincing architects to share their work isn't easy. "It's going to be a slow push trying to convince architects and designers that this is a good place to put your work," said Sinclair.

Even those who have participated are a little fuzzy about its promise. "These are things I don't think a whole lot about. Maybe, it's kind of a generation thing," said Porchdog designer Marlon Blackwell. That sentiment, Sinclair said, is common among designers.

Still, Sinclair remains devoted to his organization's purpose and the promise of crowdsourced design. "There's no silver bullet for the future of housing or the future of structures," he told TreeHugger. "There are a hundred million solutions: We're trying to create a conduit that will allow that to happen."