“Addressing global humanitarian challenges with architectural solutions.”—Architecture for Humanity website

Architecture for Humanity helped reset the discussion on what architecture actually means in contemporary times. Architecture’s priority should not be just environmental sculpture to serve the rich, but rather a process and a result to serve all human beings and especially those who are suffering due to natural or manmade disasters. The definition of manmade disasters extends to the side effects of economic and political systems.

The 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Calderones, Peru, in 2007 heavily damaged the original Maria Auxiliadora School. Architecture for Humanity did the reconstruction.

In a lengthy dialog on architecture writer Fred Bernstein’s Facebook page, Architecture for Humanity’s last executive director, Eric Cesal, wrote about the organization’s founders, “Kate and Cameron have probably done as much as any two people alive to advance the cause of humanitarian design. The whole profession of architecture is better for it. And they stand poised to give the profession another gift: a full and transparent accounting of the history of Architecture for Humanity. What worked, what didn’t, what other organizations could learn from.”

I don’t personally know Eric, Kate, or Cameron. I don’t have a personal stake in the current discussion about the demise of the organization. I want to celebrate the success and understand what can be learned from its failures.

It is important to remember just how radical their proposition was. I think the founders and the most recent executive director had the same overarching vision for the potential of design to alleviate suffering. The struggle now will be not to let the finger pointing that comes with the understanding the demise obscure the mission of resetting architecture on a new, or indeed a very old, path. Modernism was born, to a large degree, in the pursuit of social housing. We need to return to the roots of the idea, not the style. This is what the organization did, and boldly.

It is interesting that the closing of Architecture for Humanity comes at the same time as a public debate on architecture initiated on the New York Times Op-Ed page by architectural journalist Martin Pedersen and architect Steven Bingler and a response in Architecture magazine from noted curator and writer Aaron Betsky. Perhaps less well-known is the ongoing struggle of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) to get the AIA to condemn building high-security solitary confinement prisons and execution chambers. The AIA recently decided that its code of ethics did not need to condemn these practices. These stories are linked because the practice of architecture risks, as Pedersen and Bingler suggest, a disconnect from the human experience. At the very least architecture should not promote human suffering.

Terence Riley, the former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, also weighed in on Fred’s Facebook page, writing, “My take: low-income housing, medical and school facilities, and emergency settlements are problems that governments have to solve. Nonprofits and NGO’s might have the right attitudes but not the wherewithal.”

I think Riley may be getting at the heart of the matter. Architecture for Humanity’s bankruptcy may have happened because its ambitions exceeded its resources and abilities. More specifically, it may have failed financially because it got into the development business.

Architecture, in its current mode as a tool of the one percent, cannot possibly stretch as far as Architecture for Humanity tried. Smaller organizations that more effectively limit the breadth of their activities, such as Public Architecture or MASS Design Group, go on because their reach is within the context of architecture’s current role in culture. They implement discrete programs or buildings with donations from corporations and individuals. This is not a criticism of their work. We are talking about scale and growth. I think Architecture for Humanity’s leaders wanted something really big. They wanted to have architecture return to its early modernist roots—social responsibility—and to do what government often couldn’t do: use design to really change individual lives.

TAF Community Learning Space was undertaken as a fee for service project by Public Architecture.

While Cameron Sinclair tries to answer Fred Bernstein’s request about project statistics, I think we know that there was an impact—a significant impact on how many of us think about architecture for the future. We need to find ways, big and small, to refocus the purpose of architecture in the 21st century. First we have to say no to prisons (and our hideous profit-making and racist prison system), say no to detention camps like the one at Guantanamo Bay, and say no to architecture that tortures and kills people. Then we need to take the money (even just one percent, as Public Architecture suggests) that we get to build structures for the wealthy and use it to help build environments that alleviate suffering. The infrastructures that support this endeavor may be modified after the Architecture for Humanity experience, but the vision and the will cannot be lost.