Kate Stohr

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Kate Stohr is the co-founder and managing director of Architecture for Humanity (AFH) and co-editor of Design Like You Give a Damn. A journalist by training, Stohr has written for international, national, and local news outlets on environmental impact, and urban and architectural issues. In addition, as a documentary producer, she has worked on shows for A&E, BBC Television, and PBS. In 1998, she and husband/partner Cameron Sinclair created AFH to provide architectural solutions to humanitarian crises and bring design services to communities in need.

Education: I was at NYU and then did my graduate work at Columbia, where I received my master’s in journalism, with a focus on urban planning issues.

On founding AFH with Cameron Sinclair: I don’t think it was so much a decision as just something that happened. We weren’t intending to start it as an organization. Cameron is an architect and he was watching television one night and looking at the streams of refugees returning from Kosovo. Winter was coming, and he felt that the houses amid rubble and half standing presented an opportunity for architects to help in this major human catastrophe. He was trying to find a way to get involved. He originally felt that he would just go and design something, but then in talking to [Architectural Record Editor-in-Chief] Bob Ivy, Bob rightly pointed out to him that he was a young architect in New York with no experience doing transitional housing and whose experience is commercial and retail and offices. How would he be able to help? I think Cameron’s response was, “I may not be able to, but someone will.”

Together, we hosted an online design competition to address the needs of returning refugees. This was in ’98, so it would’ve been one of the first online architecture competitions. We got a lot of press, and I think it captured people’s attention, partly because there were so many architects out there who were doing a lot of work in front of their computers and not getting a chance to interact meaningfully with clients. I think for them, this was an opportunity to do something meaningful that fit in with their reasons for becoming an architect to begin with. I think most people choose an avocation because they want to help people, and architects are no different.

We did this basically small project, but we had hundreds of entries. One of the entries was a Serbian team who sent along with their entry a note that said,” It’s not us who are doing this, it’s our leaders.” It was a moving experience. I also think it was moving for all the people who entered because they could see everybody else’s work. It was a very open design competition, and it was different from many of the other competitions that are held. After that, we got tons of emails and phone calls from architects who wanted to volunteer their time and talents and there was no real way to help them do that. That’s how Architecture for Humanity was born: out of the desire from all of these architects to get involved. We’ve been working ever since to create opportunities for them to get involved and be a part of community design.

How many AFH structures have been built? Over a hundred, so far. We actually have a number of them in the U.S., and some are done by our chapters. AFH Detroit finished a house in Detroit, for example. AFH New York has a number of projects there. We also did quite a bit of work after Hurricane Katrina. We have a large program called the Biloxi Model Homes, for which volunteer architects designed seven model houses that meet the new elevational requirements, but also are affordable for residents there who earn less than $26,000 per year on average. It’s an ongoing program and it’s been really exciting for us to work on that. It’s extremely successful and [has been] mirrored by a lot of people. We also started the Forgivable Loan program with a community partner, so we helped bring $3 million dollars into the community to fund reconstruction or rehab. What we’re most proud of is that we brought architects together with a community partner. If you live in Biloxi, you can walk into our design studio and get help rebuilding your home. Five hundred families have done that so far.

The Open Architecture Network: I think that’s the most exciting thing we’ve done to date. The reason I’m excited about it is because it was so hard for us when we started to see what everybody else was doing. We have projects all over the world, and it would be six months before we saw pictures of them. How do you make funding decisions when information gets to you so late? And then we get through all this work and there was no way of easily sharing what we’d learned from the project. Someone would e-mail us, wanting to look at low-cost housing or the soccer pitches that were designed and developed for Africa. We would have to e-mail out these 20, 40 Mb packages and mail them on CDs. It was incredibly cumbersome.

The Open Architecture Network makes it possible for people to open source their design work. To me, that’s revolutionary because in the past, architecture was the purview of the affluent and not necessarily by choice of the architect. It’s just that a lot of the work was in proprietary software. It was difficult to share it with clients or even with partners who were working with the project. This makes it so much easier and it allows the architects to share their work while maintaining their intellectual property.

I think that we’re going to see a whole new interest in architecture and collaboration between architects and a new way of thinking about the intellectual property that drives architecture. I think it’s truly revolutionary, and the world and the public at large are going to have a new appreciation for architecture because they’re finally going to understand what it’s all about.

The Open Architecture Challenge: The Open Architecture Challenge was about digital inclusion. It was motivated by the idea that being able to get online and access information, markets, and educational opportunity is revolutionizing the world. It’s the first thing that happens when you go into a disaster zone. It’s the first thing that communities ask for because they want jobs. They want access to useful marketplace information and sometimes media.

This competition was to design technology centers in parts of the developing world [Kenya, Ecuador, and Nepal] that do not have access to the Internet. It was inspired in part by the need for communities, but also the need from AMD [designer and producer of microprocessor and graphics and media solutions for the computer, communications, and consumer electronics industries], which has been working in these communities and was struggling because the facilities that they were putting these computers in were not appropriate. They wouldn’t be wired correctly. They wouldn’t be secure. There were all sorts of issues they found as they gave computers and computing power to community groups, but they weren’t able to actually maintain it or use it. They’d come back several years later and computers [would be] piled up in a corner.

They were looking for solutions to build these facilities smarter and better and to have the community more engaged in the work, so that there would be some ownership. Design lets you do that, so this competition was about coming up with several solutions that AMD and other technology partners can use in their work in trying to spread digital inclusion. There will be one winner of the competition, but the idea was to have a portfolio of design solutions that would be available to them that they could download, contact the designer, and access. The Open Architecture Network makes that possible, so it’s pretty exciting.

The biggest surprise: How misunderstood the profession of architecture is. It never occurred to me that people really don’t understand architecture. They don’t understand where the architect’s work ends and the contractor’s work begins. They’re confused and many people don’t see the value of having an architect as a part of the program. When we put architects out in the field and they begin to work with community groups, we find that they become the anchors. Communities are so grateful, and they come back and begin to understand the power of having somebody think thoughtfully about their space and help them to implement their vision.

All of these things are second nature to us, but not to somebody who’s managing a community group or trying to bring services to people who sometimes are living on less than $2 a day. It’s exciting to see them appreciate this and to see how architecture can be used in other ways than the conventional wisdom. That’s the most exciting thing: expanding the definition of architecture and making it more valuable to people. The interesting side effect is that our funders begin to appreciate the value of architecture and of having an architect involved in a program. Overall, it raises the profile of the profession as a whole.

Down the road: We’re doing work all over the world and connecting architects with projects. We’ve been growing a lot. We have 20 projects on the boards right now and some of them are programs with numerous facilities in them, so it’s exciting to take this idea and now bring it to scale.

AFH at the AIA Convention in Boston: We’re going to be there. AFH Boston does a fundraising 5k run for us every year, which is really cool and we’ve never been to one. They keep threatening that they’re not going to do it unless we come. The run’s going to be held at the same time and we’ve been told that we have to compete in the race, so we’re going to be at the convention. We’ll be in our AFH t-shirts and we’ll be running and anyone who wants to join us is more than welcome.

What architects should know about AFH: That they can get involved and it doesn’t have to be a huge commitment of time. That there are ways to support projects that range from helping spec out a specific material to taking a few months off and doing a design fellowship with us. We would find a way to work with them. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how young you are. You just have to care about what you’re doing.