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MOST POPULAR POSTS Feature: Eric Cesal Talks , Humanity, Search OpenIDEO Announces 11 Job and the Future Opportunities October 16, 2014 Feature: The Future of is CATEGORIES Economics Feature: How will Public Interest Design Announcement (210) look in 2024? 18… Annual Report (10) ArchRecord: 30 Nonprofit Firms & Article (371) Organizations Award (175) Feature: Eric Cesal Talks Architecture, Book (56) Humanity, and the… Competition (53) New Design for Social Impact Graduate Crowdfunding (36) Program Launches Event (274) “World’s 10 Most Innovative Architecture… Exhibition (49) Learn HCD Online with IDEO.org and Feature (4) +Acumen Fellowship (71) “Greening the City” On Rebel Architecture Film (42) Today Funding (80) New MASS Video on “Design that Heals” Fundraising (43) Infographic (27) Interview (23) Job (42) Gilad Meron recently spoke with Architecture for Humanity‘s Executive Director Eric Poster (7) Cesal about what’s on the horizon for the 15­year­old organization and the Profile (304) architecture profession in general. Report (25) Resource (18) Gilad Meron: You’ve recently become the new Executive Director of Survey (11) Architecture for Humanity, the first change in leadership since the Video (250) organization was founded. What’s shifted since then? Webinar (17) Website (28) Eric Cesal: I think the landscape has changed from when Architecture for Humanity was started and that presents a lot of opportunities. First we want to continue doing all the work that we’ve been doing. It’s important that we continue our practice. The POST ARCHIVES world is urbanizing rapidly. Climate change is accelerating. You don’t have to be a ► 2014 (470) genius or a psychic to see that disasters are becoming a new normal. The question ► 2013 (511) is how can we work as preventers rather than responders. My question for the ► 2012 (439) field is, over the next ten or fifteen years, what are we going to do to prevent ► 2011 (318) the calamities that we know are coming as opposed to just taking advantage of bad situations and putting in good architecture? TAGS

GM: Is that the direction you want to lead Architecture for Humanity in? aia AIGA Alan Ricks Architectural Record Architecture for EC: There are two principle goals that I want to drive the organization towards. First, Humanity Autodesk Bryan Bell is an expansion of our mission to position Architecture for Humanity as a Butaro Hospital Co.Design Co.Exist Code for teacher and mentor. We have learned a lot over the last 15 years that everyone in this field could use. I want Architecture for Humanity to send the message to every America Cooper­Hewitt National young out there that wants to change the world or wants to start their own Curry Stone Design Prize D­Rev Design organization or that wants to move design forward in a positive way, that we can Corps Design Ignites Change Design help teach them. I would like to see Architecture for Humanity helping smaller Observer Emily Pilloton Enterprise organizations scale and increase their impact. Community Partners Enterprise Rose

Fellowship The second major goal is a shift in direction to drive Architecture for Humanity to a Fast Company where it’s being proactive as opposed to reactive. Upon our founders’ GOOD IDEO IDEO.org retirement, we did a deep strategic dive and looked at the whole history of John Cary Krista Donaldson Architecture for Humanity as well as the history of public interest design and there MASS Design was always something fundamentally reactive about these efforts. We wait for a Group Metropolis Magazine natural disaster to happen and buildings to fall down, or we wait for communities to

plunge into a health crisis. Then we fly in and do some sort of intervention. We put in Michael Murphy National low­income housing, or we build a community center; essentially we try and address Endowment for the Arts NEA New

something that’s already gone bad by putting in something good. York Times Project H Design Public Architecture Public Interest Design Architecture Public Interest Design I think the direction that we need to go, and the direction of the entire public Week Public Policy Lab SEED Network interest field needs to go, is more of a preventer. We know what causes a natural disaster. We know what causes slum growth. We’re familiar with the urban Structures for Inclusion Studio H TED factors that lead to unhealthy cities. What is our role as architects and in TEDCity2.0 The 1% Thomas Fisher University of getting in front of those problems and stopping them before they become outright Minnesota University of Minnesota catastrophes? College of Design

GM: So what does that mean for the role architects and designers play in society?

EC: Raul Pantaleo of Studio TAMassociati talks about this. He refers to the last 15 years of public interest design as the age of innocence. It’s what we’ve seen for the past decade and a half; we go in and we build one shining example of a building, this one innovative thing, and then we expect that it will actually lead to some sort of larger sociocultural or economic or political change. I’m not going to call it naïve but it’s a blatant modernist approach.

I think in the last 15 years, there’s been some progress on that front but the problems are growing bigger than our solutions, or growing faster than our solutions, I should say. I think it’s time to address a more aggressive strategy in terms of putting architects in front of the problem and saying, “Hey, don’t build this dam. Don’t pass this code. Don’t build in this way.” It’s cliché by now but I’m always saying, stopping bad architecture is just as important as making good architecture.

GM: It sounds like you’re suggesting a shift in the entire profession of architecture and design?

EC: I’m not interested in creating a parallel profession of public interest design alongside regular design. I think that all of us look forward to a world where Architecture for Humanity doesn’t have to exist and I think people like John Peterson would agree with me with respect to Public Architecture. The reason all these public interest design firms got started was to push the moral compass of the profession of architecture in a certain direction, right? The end game has to be when the profession of architecture itself is sufficiently humanitarian and civic minded that the whole concept of a citizen architect is absurd because every architect acts as an informed citizen. I would like architecture to be understood in that way.

I think that is the change that we are really looking for and, in terms of the program that I’ve laid out for Architecture of Humanity over the next 10 or 15 years, if we put ourselves in a position of being a mentor to, let’s say 1000 young designers, 1000 young organizations that want to grow, and we help them grow to the scale of Architecture for Humanity, well then Architecture for Humanity just becomes obsolete. That’s the point, you know?

GM: Yeah, it’s a really interesting concept; that a nonprofit should always be working with the long­term goal of putting itself out of business. But I guess the obvious question is how do you go about doing that?

EC: I think we need to start recognizing and quantifying the indirect costs associated with bad buildings. In the last 20 years, disasters have cost the world over two trillion dollars in economic losses. That’s the cost of bad design and bad construction, but we attribute the cost to the disaster that caused the building to fall down, rather than the architect who didn’t design it to withstand a storm.

GM: That seems like you’re putting a lot of the onus on the architect. Is it really their job to design for any possible disaster?

EC: No, but I think we can, as a profession, do a better job of at least designing for more of them. We do so in other contexts, just not the built environment. For example, in health, we acknowledge that we can’t ignore an Ebola crisis in Africa or a Tuberculosis outbreak in Russia because sooner or later the effects of ignoring it come and bite us at home. In the same way, architecture affects our entire world. When Hurricane Sandy hit NYC and took out lower Manhattan it caused a global disruption in financial markets. Our fates as human beings are inextricably linked so even if you don’t have a humanitarian agenda, you have an interest in self­ preservation.

The commercial side of being an architect is realizing that our economies are based on our built environment. In the United States the construction industry creates one out of every six jobs. As architects we have an influence over that because typically what gets built is what we design. If we’re designing with metal studs, we are stimulating the metal industry. If we’re designing with lumber, we’re stimulating forestry. I think tying ourselves into all of these questions and all of these realities make disasters our public enemy number one and they make resilience at the top of a public agenda.

GM: Should architecture really be just about preventing disasters?

EC: The human population is growing and urban population is exploding so I don’t think traditional architects of the world will run out of work any time soon. But to your point, architects and designers can influence buildings in lots of positive ways. I think that buildings can have an ongoing impact on quality of life. For example, we talk about design increasing productivity or reducing the spread of disease, but there are proactive impacts as well… what if all building were designed to increase productivity?

Let’s just make a wild assumption that work productivity goes up by 10%. Multiple that by a global work force of 1 billion people, suddenly there are real impacts. Or let’s say that buildings could promote public health and someone who lives in a well designed building over the course of their life will spend 10% less on healthcare than someone who lives in a regular designed building? Now what if that was affecting even 1 billion people on the planet? Suddenly there are impacts at the scale of trillions of dollars, not to mention improved quality of life. GM: These types of outcomes are not exactly part of a traditional architecture education, does need to change as well?

EC: I think the most urgent change that needs to happen in architectural education is to break down the insularity that we’re so famous for. We lock our young in these ceremonial long houses of the cult of architect that we call studios. It’s too typical that a student will get a design project and for the first two weeks you go to the site and do studies and maybe walk around the neighborhood, but after that you’re more or less hermetically sealed in studio, building models and doing renderings. How can students possibly be expected to graduate with an informed view of the world?

The problem is that we’re trying to teach people design before they’ve really experienced the world and it should be the opposite. People should come to design training with sufficient amounts of experiences to inform that design. You’ve got to get people out; you’ve got to show them how bad the world can get and how ugly it can get right around the corner from their house. Once you live that experience, it touches you and it can’t untouch you. You walk around with that for the rest of your life and all of the design that you do from there on is informed by those sorts of experiences. Otherwise, you’re just an empty vessel that gets filled up with whatever is in the magazines and the books or in .

GM: Any last thoughts?

EC: There are a lot of questions about the future direction of public interest design. Do we get more involved in legal advocacy? Do we contribute more to mainstream public media? Do we work more closely with economists? There’s a whole new nut to crack over the next 15 years that’s different than the previous 15 years. Collectively, we have an opportunity to help answer that question.

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