Design Like You Give a Damn

From Kosovo to New Orleans: the Biloxi Model Home Project

Alex Padalka interviews Kate Stohr, one of the co-founders of the Architecture for Humanity project, conducted by over phone and email

Kate Stohr was one of the co-founders, along with Cameron Sinclair, of the Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit group formed in 1999 to respond to the Kosovo refugee crisis. Everything started with an online competition, according to Stohr, and ever since then everything has been "very web-based." The Open Architecture Network recently launched was Sinclair's and Stohr's response to an organization that went from two people to thousands, an attempt to "manage something viral."

The organization quickly became a darling of the architectural community and gained worldwide prominence, working with local housing groups to aid in disaster relief housing programs. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005, however, the group was caught by surprise.

"We were bombarded with donations before we had a plan to respond," says Stohr "We had to really figure out where to start."

What AFH found when they went into East Biloxi, Mississippi to assess their ability to help was a scarcity of local housing groups. To start rebuilding homes immediately, AFH partnered with the Biloxi Relief Recovery and Revitalization Center to do "basic common sense work," as well as with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio of Mississippi State University and others to address the long-term goals of reconstruction in a hurricane-prone region.

The Biloxi Model Home Project eventually raised a $3 million loan fund to go toward the rehabilitation of 70 damaged homes and construct seven brand new ones. AFH invited architects to submit designs for single-family homes that would meet the new building codes as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's tentative guidelines to lift all houses six to 12 ft off the ground, a directive still under review known as the Advisory Base Flood Elevation. AFH received 12 designs and in August 2006 took the authors down to the Salvation Army Headquarters in East Biloxi for an open house, where the community was invited to choose the architects they wanted. The residents chose six: Bret Zamore Design, CP+D Workshop , Huff + Gooden Architects, Marlon Blackwell Architect, MC² Architects, and Studio Gang Architects. Their choices, in at least two instances, seem based as much on the design of the home as on the architect that would eventually mold the design into a construction-ready plan: two Vietnamese architects decided to work with a Vietnamese architect, MC²'s Chuong Q. B. Nguyen.

At one point, AFH brought down 30 to 40 students in architectural training and had two project architects onsite and a project manager, but the bulk of the work is now being handled by the local groups and the home owners themselves.

"You take a group of people that lost everything, have never done any economic development work, have never set up a loan fund or did housing funding, much less built a house - and we take them from not having any sort of project to where they run their own housing recovery program."

Three of the homes are currently under construction and four will start this summer - all seven are expected to be completed in the fall. According to Stohr, the homes cost from $110,000 to $140,000 to build, depending on the elevation and the size of the home. Throughout the process of seeing through the design to an affordably constructed, habitable, and safe house, AFH keeps track of lessons learned, from inexpensive local materials to structural implications of elevated homes, to simple things like easily moveable window shutters and kitchen layouts for homes that may need to stockpile food for several days of another hurricane strike.

Stohr points out that the knowledge gained during the Biloxi Model Home program will apply to other OAN projects - but the work on the Gulf Coast is far from over.

"People forget that most of the people on the gulf coast are so displaced and haven't gotten back into their homes or even a semblance of a normal life. There are thousands of houses in East Biloxi waiting to be rebuilt - we will be down there for years, literally, so it's never too late to get involved."

Alex Padalka: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we hit its true potential?

Kate Stohr: I think people are going to begin to identify experts....be they accredited or non-accredited, but able to offer truly unique knowledge on a subject....

Q: What do you think motivates your contributors? Is it money or some other incentive?

A: Architects and designers actually really want to see their work built. Often designs go unrealized. For a typical firm something like eight or nine out of 10 projects never makes it to construcion. So, opportunities to share it and allow it to be built are exciting to them.

Q: Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds? If so, what's the clearest example you know of?

A: Absolutely. People know what’s best for them whether they are making choices online or off... As one of our community partners is fond of saying, “Nobody can protect my interests like I can...”

Q: What surprised you the most with your project? (Biloxi)

A: What surprised me the most were the choices the families made in terms of design... They were downright avante garde. We thought they would choose some of the more traditional designs. Not at all. It just goes to show that one should never underestimate the sophistication of one’s client.