When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change.
Success will only happen with Afghans leading the charge, and it is far, far more important for Kabul to create and support a purpose-driven school of architecture than to invite a high profile designer to build.
When you build a beautiful building, people love it. And the most sustainable building in the world is the one that’s loved.
Design is about creating spaces for people to enjoy and of course, creating moments where you elevate the spirit, but 'design for good' is figuring out a program that not only creates better spaces, but creates jobs, creates new industry and really kind of raises the conversation about how we rebuild.
It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.
Many feel that sitting at a screen sweating over the design of handrail details for the next cute downtown boutique hotel just doesn't make sense when more than 150,000 people have lost their lives, more than five million people have been made homeless and whole towns have been swept away.
When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared.
Forget your environmental footprint. Think about your ethical footprint. What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best?
A career is a job you love, right? That's what a career should be. If you're in a job that you hate, you should quit. That's the way I look at it. I'm in a job that I love so I'm going to make it my career.
A true architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large. We create vessels in which life happens.
When you as a designer design something that burdens a community with maintenance and old world technology, basically failed developed world technology then you will crush that community way beyond bad design; you'll destroy the economics of that community and often the community socially is broken.
Some of the best work that's happening right now is from architects who have remained in their home countries and who have focused on a local or national identity and the idea of critical regionalism.
An architect is not an artist but an optimistic realist.
I build community. However, I do it wearing a number of hats.
We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades.
If you focus on design, you can call yourself a designer. If you focus on the implementation of your design, you can call yourself an architect.
The fact that the president (Michelle Bachelet) was out giving minute-to-minute reports a few hours after the quake in the middle of the night gives you an indication of their disaster response.
The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.
Through training, practice, and a deep sense of optimism, architects see opportunities where others only see a void. This has been the driving principle behind Architecture for Humanity since our founding.
Families want their child to get an education; families want safe access to healthcare; families want a roof over their head. When we silo issues, we end up with solutions that are in conflict with each other.
When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared. If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone' then you only impact the few and not the many.
After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.
Ego gets you inches but it doesn't get you impact.
For me, I think the most exciting thing in architecture is the re-emergence of the locally-focused architect.
Treat the world like a failed state, then you can understand the players needed to fix it.
