I grew up in a rough neighborhood in south London. The physical landscape affected me every day—not the cathedrals and monuments, that wasn’t my world. I was living in concrete block towers. So for me, architecture was kind of a bad word at the beginning. But I was a wanderer and used to run away from home all the time; I ran around the streets of London. And I became fascinated by the fact that I could be in another neighborhood—one that had roughly the same economic standing as my own—but the structure of the buildings and the design of that neighborhood made all the difference. It could make a place feel safer, more vibrant. Not because the people were richer, but because the environment had been built with some thought and understanding of the needs of those people. And so I gradually came to believe that being an architect was about how we improve the lives of the people we’re serving, while taking into consideration the environment we’re affecting.

 

But then, when I went to architecture school, what was being taught was not the architecture of happiness or of place; it was the architecture of grandeur. I was kind of confused by this philosophy of “form follows finance”—or maybe “form follows fevered ego.” In any case, it was all about the celebrity architect. I was a black sheep in that environment. But I wasn’t alone: I think all around the world, by that time, there were students and architects starting to say, ‘There’s something wrong here.’

 

If you go back to the 1950s and before, there was this great ideal that design can change the world. But I think the architecture world became gun-shy after the 60s and 70s.

 

In my view, there were a couple of reasons why. One, there was this extreme vision of utopia that people were aiming for—and the fact is, there’s no such thing as utopia. So people looked at these Utopian designers and dreamers and said, ‘These guys don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Another issue is that you had these community-based designers, doing brilliant work. But once they went to scale their projects, what happened was the policy stripped away all the community aspects of those projects. Parks became car-parks, balconies became gated enclosures, boulevards became tiny corridors. So, the scaling of the community-based projects became the public housing disasters of the 70s. And I think what happened was that architects got blamed for it all. Architects aren’t politically vocal; we spend our lives fighting each other. So we couldn’t get together and say, ‘No, actually, you’re wrong.’ And so we ended up getting trodden upon as an industry. And then we said ‘OK, we’ll be a services industry now.’

But the pendulum is swinging back now. Our organization hit the sweet spot. We came about at a time when there was the beginning of this sense of urgency about the environment, and about the tipping point of population, and the fact that so many more people were living in urban environments. At the same time, the web was exposing more people to these issues and challenges—with a click of the mouse you could find out what was going on anywhere in the world. And you could connect with people who might share your concerns and ideas. Finally, what put things over the top was the fact that we had a catalog of natural disasters—the tsunami, 9/11, Katrina.

 

We quadrupled our membership in three months after 9/11. I think a lot of architects went home and said, ‘What am I doing with my life? What does it mean to build in a complex world like this?’ People began to ask questions they hadn’t been asking themselves before.

When you look at the root of real poverty, it really has to do with the access to opportunities, such as education, health, and adequate housing. All of these require innovative and very pragmatic approaches to designing. And this is where the philosophy of “Design Like You Give a Damn” really came into form—I was basically trying to say, ‘Stop talking about how you’re going to save the planet, and do it! You’re a designer, not a politician.’

 

A lot of younger designers have responded to that. I think the current generation is having a mid-20s crisis. You’ve just done seven years of education; you’ve honed your skills to really understand cutting edge technology, materials, construction. Then you go out into the workforce and you’re basically a CAD-monkey for five years. You’re treated like the lowest of the low. You get to about 28, 29 and freak out. I’ve done that kind of work, I know what that’s like. It can be mind numbing. When you go from that to humanitarian design, the challenges are so much greater, and the need for creativity is so much stronger.

When a disaster happens, the role for design is not needed in the first phases of just dealing with the emergency. However, if you can go in and volunteer your time to just live and work in the town or village, in those first 3 to 6 months it’s about listening. And finding out, what are the things that really mean a lot to this community? And even, ‘What is beauty here?’ We’re asking designers to redefine that, because what is beautiful in India maybe different from Tanzania. And it’s also about categorizing need: Is it more important to have clean water or solar technology? You have to try to readjust your mindset of the importance of things with in that local environment.

 

For instance, if we’re doing a medical facility in sub Saharan Africa and you want to create enough light so doctors can see what they’re doing, well, you’re right on equator and you have strong sunlight which, if used well especially in secondary areas of facility, can lower your lighting maintenance costs and improve the chances the building will succeed. On the other hand, you may have to deal with unusual design issues. In Sri Lanka, we had to deal with human–elephant conflict. Increased urbanization had hit the migration routes of elephants; and nobody told the elephants that. So they were walking through villages and needed a rest, they’d sit on someone’s house. So we actually had our designers work with an elephant migration expert, to develop design strategies that would not interfere with the routes of elephants. You don’t get taught that in Columbia’s school of architecture!

In many of these areas, you have what’s known as “the broken Land Rover syndrome.” Which means many of these doctors out in the field are so focused on day to day needs they can’t get beyond the fact that the Land Rover is broken. But when they do have time to think about it, they have all these ideas—like, what if we had a mobile clinic? The trouble is, they have no way of going to the head of the medical or grant-making organization and saying, ‘We need mobile health clinics, and this is what it might look like, and this is how we could do it.’ They know what their needs are—but they don’t know how to show it. A lot of what we do is work with NGOs and community groups to develop a design that explains not only the issues, but the solution—because the reality is, people don’t fund problems, they fund solutions. And that is what design can do. Whether it’s industrial, graphic design, architecture—we’re solution makers. We can take a very large and ambiguous issue, and package it in a way that enables us to say: Here is the alternative to FEMA trailers. Or to crumbling schools in the northern plains.

 

I think design is a political act. Every thing we do has ramifications on a community level and on a personal level. So to do what we’re doing, you have to be a pretty good politician—without those skills, you have no way of getting your idea realized. Had I not been a designer I probably would have ended up in politics. The other thing you have to do is check your ego at the door and collaborate. We’re crossing not just geographic and political boundaries, but also aesthetic and ethical boundaries between different groups. If you have some particular dogma you bring to the table—‘I was taught under the such-and-such school of design and this is how we do things—you’re not going to survive very long.