His design is to meet human needs

When Cameron Sinclair was an architecture student, he designed temporary housing for New York's homeless that would obscure the view of the Statue of Liberty. His proposal: Once the city could properly house its "huddled masses," it could have its view of the lady with the lamp back.

"There was a little bit of agitprop in there," says Mr. Sinclair, a pale, sandy-haired young Scotsman who now lives in the United States. "Everyone else wanted to be Frank Gehry," he recalls of his student days. "I was kind of a black sheep" looking for low-cost design solutions.

A few years later, in 1999, he and his wife, journalist Kate Stohr, founded Architecture for Humanity (AFH), with the lofty aim of applying innovative design concepts to help those suffering around the world.

Today, his methods remain unorthodox:

• He refuses to reveal the locations of AFH projects to television news crews. The story should be "What do we need to do to allow this community to rebuild?' " he says, but too often TV crews' attitude is "let's see some suffering."

• Plans for a building or other structures developed for AFH are available to anyone - for free. "Any nonprofit can come to us and ask, 'Can we have the construction documents for that project you did?" he says. "[And we say,] 'absolutely!' "

• AFH won't put signs with its name or that of donors on a project it builds. The building, Sinclair says, belongs to the community, not AFH or the donors. "If you donated to our organization, you know you built it, I know you built it," Sinclair says. "Why do you need to force it down their throats?"

• AFH doesn't rush in after a disaster. "We shouldn't be there in the first day or two. That's inappropriate. That's really offensive to communities," he says, whose first needs are food, clothing, and information about family members. "The idea that an architect is this person who flies in, jumps off the plane, and goes to the rescue is just about the worst image possible."

With just three full-time staff, AFH relies on some 2,500 designers and other volunteers in 60 or so chapters worldwide. Some 27,000 people subscribe to its e-mail newsletter (www.architectureforhumanity.org). Its projects include helping Gulf Coast residents rebuild after hurricane Katrina and designing earthquake-proof housing for Pakistan as well as shelters in tsunami-wracked Asia. Sinclair and AFH have won a passel of awards, including the respected INDEX Design Award in Denmark last year. But now the quirky organization is about to step into a giant spotlight. Thursday the TED conference, a group of about 1,000 movers and shakers from a broad cross section of professions and industries, will grant Sinclair $100,000 and the opportunity to have a "wish" fulfilled.

Sinclair is "an astonishing person," says Chris Anderson, the chairman and host of of the TED Conference. "He's been incredibly effective at getting people excited, at raising the issues without [having] any money."

Sinclair, who estimates he earned about $12,000 last year, has been running AFH with nothing more than a laptop computer and a cellphone. The couple is based in Bozeman, Mont., but this winter he's in Minneapolis, teaching a course on humanitarian architecture at the University of Minnesota. At the same time, he continues to fly around the world speaking and working on AFH projects. (The AFH website has a feature called "Where's Cameron now?")

"We would love for him to move his whole operation here," says Thomas Fisher, dean of the college of architecture at the University of Minnesota. In contrast to today's "me first" culture, Professor Fisher says, Sinclair shows that the world takes notice "when somebody steps up and says, 'No, it's actually about devoting yourself to others.' "

AFH's first project was a competition to design temporary housing in Kosovo, a province of Serbia devastated by civil war. Sinclair and Ms. Stohr decided simply to plunge in and announce their idea on the Internet. "I don't think anyone knew what to make of us," Sinclair says in a recent interview in an upstairs lobby at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. When they received 215 entries from more than 30 countries, "It shocked us."

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