Cameron Sinclair - Architecture for Humanity
The Beautiful Game - Social Change Through the Power of Football

Workshop July 14-17 2008, by application
Public lecture July 14 at 6pm, open to all

Press release

Comunicato stampa

See and Download Cameron Sinclair Lecture and Interview

See Fabrica Soccer Game

Download "The Beautiful Game" workshop booklet

Cameron Sinclair is the co-founder and 'eternal optimist' for Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization founded to develop architectural and design solutions to humanitarian crises and provide pro-bono design services to communities in need. Currently the organization working in fourteen countries on projects ranging from school, health clinics, affordable housing and long term sustainable reconstruction.

Trained as an architect at the University of Westminster and the The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Sinclair developed an interest in social, cultural and humanitarian design. His postgraduate thesis focused on providing shelter to New York's homeless through sustainable, transitional housing. After his studies, he moved to New York where he worked as a designer and project architect.

Sinclair is a regular lecturer and visiting professor at schools in the United States and abroad and has contributed to a number of exhibitions dealing with social justice and design. He has spoken at a number of international conferences and forums on sustainable development and post disaster reconstruction, including appearances on BBC World Service and CNN International, National Public Radio and PBS.

Sinclair and Architecture for Humanity co-founder Kate Stohr have compiled a compendium on socially conscious design titled "Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises" (May 2006, Metropolis Books). He serves on advisory boards of the Acumen Fund, Detroit Collaborative Design Center and the Institute for State Effectiveness.

In 2004 Fortune Magazine named Cameron Sinclair was named as one of the Aspen Seven, seven people changing the world for the better. He was the recipient of the 2006 TED prize and the 2005 RISD/Target Emerging Designer of the Year. Recently he was selected as a 2008 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and named as one of the 2008 Principal Voices for CNN.
Along with co-founder Kate Stohr, was awarded the Wired Magazine 2006 Rave Award for Architecture for their work in responding to housing needs following Hurricane Katrina.

As a result of the TED Prize he and Stohr launched the Open Architecture Network, the world’s first open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.

The workshop results will inspire a critical essay by Colin Davies, head of MA programmes at the School of Art and Design, University of Wolverhampton, UK and co-founder of the design blog www.limitedlanguage.org He is currently researching for a book to be titled: Design and Violence: from the Enlightenment to 9/11.

Workshop brief

The Beautiful Game - Social Change Through the Power of Football

In many parts of the world sporting activities, especially football, are now being incorporated into a variety of programmes geared toward helping youth address a broad range of issues affecting their lives. These include children's rights & education, health promotion, peace promotion, anti-discrimination & social integration, and the environment. By emphasizing a "team" approach, these programmes help impart the skills needed by the next generation to overcome the many challenges faced by their countries, from poverty to HIV/AIDS, malnutrition to low educational access.

By creating a space for gathering we can create social change through the power of football.

You are challenged to work in interdisciplinary design teams of five to develop an anchor within the lives of a community by designing a sustainable youth led football facility in a context where formal resources are severely constrained, and basic conditions for human development are challenged.

As a community service point this facility will bring in services often overlooked including access to water, energy/power, IT/technology and sanitation. The facility must also incorporate a structure to house existing youth programs and health education.

Moreover you are tasked to create a holistic program that includes a new graphical identity for the team, including home and away strip. It is important that issues of HIV/AIDS awareness are incorporated into this as the client uses football to help tackle this pandemic in the areas’ youth. This new identity should be apart of an over all strategy to create a self-sustaining model that incorporates novel approaches to income generation.

You will have approximately 3 days to develop a conceptual design and sustainability plan that will be then presented to the clients. This project has a real client and real community. While the workshop is to try and push your boundaries of design, remember that for the end users a sustainable solution is the only solution to create long-term change.

Finally remember the most important aspect of design, creating joy including your own.

The Challenge

Client:
Grassroot Soccer (GRS), Zambia

Client description:
GRS was founded by professional football players as a project aimed at mobilising the global football community in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The organization trains local role models (including professional football players) to deliver an interactive, football-themed behaviour development curriculum to young people, who are then empowered as peer educators to teach the community at large what they have learned. GRS runs its flagship projects in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Zambia and partners organizations in several other African countries.

End-users:
The community centre and the small-size football pitch will serve an average of 250-300 (up to 1000) children and youth and a staff of 10 to 30 persons daily.

Location:
Lusaka, Zambia

Timeline for Construction:
3 to 4 months

Programme:
Teams are challenged to design a small-size pitch (20m x 40m) with surrounding space for spectators (e.g. seating on elevated ground, etc.) as well as classrooms and media, health, conference and educational facilities that can offer young Africans the chance to further their scholastic and sporting education while providing health and social services. The centre will be located on the site of an existing local community partner, strengthening their activities in the community in order to improve basic education, prevent diseases and promote health as well as encourage the social integration of minorities and disadvantaged populations.

You are also charged to create a marketing and sustainability plan for the organization as well as updated graphical identity.

Design Considerations:
Teams are challenged to incorporate the needs of the community and to employ sustainable and/or local building materials and construction methods to realize their design. There is the potential to create shared services to the community at large, including access to water, power and other support services.

The artificial turf for the football pitch will be freighted to the site in two standardized shipping containers and are free to be utilized in the design if the design teams so choose.

Points to be taken into consideration in the concept phase: future prospect of this centre, expanding in terms of capacity and infrastructure, creating a self-sustaining model for the host community group and becoming development hubs for the training of social entrepreneurs.

Space Considerations:
Football pitch

Size: Length 40 m and Width 20 m
Surface: artificial turf, green
Orientation: Preferred orientation of the field is with the goals facing N.N.W. and S.S.E.
Goal: Placed in the middle of the goal line; Width 3 m between the goalposts; 2 m height (between crossbar and the ground); Goal posts 8 cm; Nets, made of hemp, jute or nylon; Depth of the goal shall be at least 80 cm at the top and 1 m at ground level; Goal placed solid in the ground.
Boarding: Option between solid boarding or fence boarding. Approximately 1m high.

Community Components

Classroom/Conference room (capacity:100)
Basic Health Care Facilities (capacity:100)
Internet Cafe
Common Space for larger gatherings
Office for staff members
Reception area

Other Components

Two toilet blocks (boys and girls)
Rainwater catchment and management system
Grandstand style seating around pitch (e.g. seating on elevated ground)
Entrance Area and perimeter fencing
Parking (for 3-5 vehicles inc. 2 mini-bus/vans)
Integration in the local landscape requested
Use of local materials and local community involvement requested

In General

The centre should be designed in a way that future expansion is possible. The idea is that the basic unit, as described above, develops over the years in regional development hubs/sustainable business. You are not limited to just a football centre but this will be the defining anchor of this project.

Construction Budget
Total Construction Budget: USD 85,000

Projected Workshop Deadlines

Presentation Requirements

1: The submission should be original in content.

2: All teams have at least one member present the solution. This presentation will be less than ten to fifteen minutes and you need to speak clearly and concisely to the jury as if they are the client and end users

3: All presentations must include the following:

a) Submission Document (REQUIRED)
This is a text document which must include your firm information and information regarding your design. Entries submitted without firm information including contact information will not be accepted.

All text should be in English. The form must include a title, a maximum 300 word description of your proposed design and a potential list of materials used in the construction of your proposed desig.

The text file must also list all team members and any details that you feel may be of interest to the client.

b) Submission Board (REQUIRED)
Format: No more than one 24 inch x 36 inch or A2 sized board.

This board should provide an overview of your concept and should be designed to convey your idea to jury members and others without the aid of accompanying submission materials.

c) Site plan (REQUIRED)
Format: No more than four 11 inch x 37 inch or A3 sized boards.

The site plan does not have to be to scale but should accurately portray the schematic layout of your proposed facility. All dimensions, though not required, should be in meters.

d) Graphical Identity (REQUIRED)
Format: No more than four 11 inch x 37 inch or A3 sized boards.

This should present your teams new graphical identity for the team including home and away strip.

e) Supplemental images (OPTIONAL)
Format: No more than four 11 inch x 37 inch or A3 sized boards.

f) Other (OPTIONAL)
Teams may present also present a physical model, hand-drawn sketches, or ink drawings. Film, 3D computer graphic renderings, web animations are also welcomed ,

4: Digital versions of all entries must be delivered to Fabrica workshop organizers before your final presentation. These digital versions must also include digital images of any physical representations.

5: Have fun. (this is not optional)

The Beautiful Game: architecture and visual communication
Colin Davies
Ravine Lago / London 2008

A recent article in the New York Times comments on a piece of software (slydial) that will allow you to go straight to voicemail when calling someone on their cellphone – giving you the opportunity to circumvent a person-to-person-call. For me, this captures one of the ironies of contemporary digital culture – increasingly we design ways to replace face-to-face communication with digital links between interfaces. Reducing conversation to a series of emails, SMS and voicemails. It’s a ‘global village’ of the impersonal rather than the inter-personal. Design – at its root – should always be about the poetics of communication – from a building to a poster; lemon squeezer to postage stamp – each should create a space to communicate in a language that is both fluid and accessible to its audience.

At the heart of the work of Cameron Sinclair, and Architecture for Humanity (co-founded with Kate Stohr), is not just a commitment to communication – it celebrates communication! His work is an example of how, when designers’ ideas materialise into an accessible language, ‘a single change [can] effect the whole community’ in places as far apart (or close) as the United States and Africa. His work is not simply ideological, or utopian but embedded in the realities of a dominant Capitalist discourse – the bottom line in his projects is always ‘are they sustainable economically’?.

The reality is, design in the West is always economic.

What is interesting about the work of Cameron and the project he instigated at Fabrica is how he is communicating issues, and working with people often only depicted in the media, as one sociologist puts it, as ‘distant suffering’

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the African continent are increasingly portrayed as synonymous in much Western media today – the virus conflates the 46 countries of the African mainland – in a sense it has become the ‘brand’ we associate with Africa above all others.

The project, The Beautiful Game - Social Change Through the Power of Football at Fabrica pivots upon celebration and communication – rather than suffering – providing a powerful pairing for students to create with. The project’s aim was to design an environment; from football kit to a social architectural space in the form of a new community centre. The flexibility of the architecture was important to allow it to respond to the needs of the community. The centre would become a dynamic element in the communication network of the village.

An architectural project at Fabrica is apposite as architecture, its processes and methodologies, shares many of the creative impulses of visual communication; both are active ingredients that dominate our everyday lives.

Architecture has always had symbolic meaning – you only need to think of the church towers which dot the Italian landscape to understand the potent mix that architecture and symbolism makes. Architecture is about more than providing shelter, storage or safety – although often important ingredients themselves. Good architecture provides spaces that both communicate and foster communication – like a graphic poster or logo – architecture addresses its audience and can, at its best, inform and improve our lives beyond basic functionality. It can symbolise the strength and dynamism of a community – beyond simple economic grandstanding.

Whether it is a community centre in Zambia or a shopping mall in downtown San Diego; to succeed as good architecture it will need to convey its intentions to its audience – its consumers. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Jon Jerde and Bernard Tschumi are aware of the role of communication in their architecture. Cameron, in introducing his project at Fabrica, is quite clear about his unease regarding the stars of architecture – building multi-million dollar projects which, a fraction of the cost would sustain communities in Africa for years – creating the possibility of a life-time of sustainable development in a small town of village for instance. But, moral issues aside – the methodology and thinking behind some projects in the West echo many of the aims of The Beautiful Game project.

Rem Koolhaas is an architect that builds from the word up; he had written a critique on architecture – Delirious New York – before he had completed any building projects. Koolhaas is an important figure when tracing the relationships between tectonics and communication design. He is also one of the few contemporary architects who draw inspiration from African urban life. After visiting Lagos he is candid when he comments 'What I thought would be depressing was powerful, inspiring and brutal.'(Van der Haak, Huystee et al. 2003) Koolhaas grasps the madness of the metropolis – and the broad role of design – and tries to make sense of it whilst still using the language of shopping malls, office blocks and high-density urbanism. Like a 1960s pop artist he reflects back to us – his audience – the language of commodity but has refocused its form, retuned the language to capture the beauty of consumption whilst introducing a critique of the commodity fetish itself: Good design should never slavishly follow fashion. In Junkspace(Office for Metropolitan Architecture. and Koolhaas 2004), Koolhass’s broad critique of the postmodern urban experience, he comments ‘Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace.’ And later, in the same essay he criticises our digital, photoshopped, step and repeat existence when commenting ‘Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation...’

What is interesting to me was how at its best, the achievement of The Beautiful Game project was in placing students and staff alike outside of their safety zone, to refocus the role of visual communication and its formal possibilities. Allowing students to see a microcosm of their own day-to-day lives – how they communicate and celebrate in a football match for instance – and to make these seemingly simple experiences the creative impulse to generate projects that would provide ecologies and relational environments, more organic – and alive – than a poster project or corporate design would have been. An important element in the projects development was creating, in essence, what the architect Bernard Tschmi calls ‘Event Architecture’. At its simplest, event architecture posits that buildings do not live in a vacuum but rather, come alive in their use. A building can be judged not on its aesthetic and formal construction but rather, on the reactions, narratives and interventions it builds with its audience/users. The challenge for visual communication is how to transfer the ‘event’ from immersive environments like architecture to 2D and digital/virtual platforms in communication design.

The central aim of the project, creating the physical space of the Community Centre, became the framework for the project as a whole – whether in the design of the football strips or how the new centre would be marketed – the actions went on inside the parameters of the space of the community centre. It is in this weave of creativity and commerce that Visual communication becomes part of the fabric of the ‘real world’ of a Zambian community.

In some of the ideas, the concept of Piezoelectricity – which couples the physical movement of celebration in the audience stands to the technology of energy production, the idea manages to succeed in being both poetic and, utilitarian. Elsewhere, the use of more traditional graphic devices – Victor’s colouring book for example – allows a simple child’s colouring book to become not a static piece of information design but an open feedback loop. The inclusion of a questionnaire in the colouring book as part of its narrative gives the community an avenue to feedback on how the community project should develop and improve. Both examples illustrate Cameron Sinclair’s concept of seeing these projects as akin to ‘acupuncture’ where a single point of change can affect the community as a whole. Some of the projects utilised the vernacular – a visual language – providing multi-purpose, open-ended structures: football matches, food markets and teaching blocks provide an atmosphere to encourage – not dictate – communication.

[In] a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites.(Calvino 1974)

Visual Communication should always look to capture the ‘imagination of the encounter’; look to foster that which could take place, and instigate a catalyst for such opportunities. Such a catalyst is required no more urgently than in today’s need to disseminate a broader understanding of HIV/AIDS – whether in the West or in Africa. Visual communication plays a central role in the flow of information about the virus.

Calvino’s quote captures the sensuous nature of communication and it is this intimate and serendipitous nature of encountering others which is lost – curtailed – in communities which suffer high HIV infection rates. When a community believes you can catch the HIV virus from sharing food it severely limits the basic physical spaces of communication – mealtimes and community festivals for instance. In Zambia, the misinformation about HIV/AIDS is life threatening. As a common refrain of woman in Africa laments: "AIDS may kill me in months or years, but hunger will kill me and my family tomorrow". The threat is crystallised in the comment by Zambian Health Minister Prof Nkandu Luo that ‘Hunger is one of the leading causes of early deaths among HIV/AIDS sufferers in the country’ and further more ‘…nutrition is [a] cornerstone in the fight against HIV/AIDS

The attraction of The Beautiful Game project is how the choice of football as its central catalyst immediately captures the intimate nature of communication – celebration in sports is a powerful communicative tool. One truly globalised action is the celebration after scoring a goal or winning a football match! Celebration (like football) is, by definition a non-solitary act; it is difficult to celebrate alone, you need a friend, a neighbour, a team or even a stranger to celebrate with. Furthermore, celebration as seen in the recent Olympics has the ability to cross the bounded structures of culture(s). Each culture has its set of social practices: rituals, symbols and so forth. Celebration – in the raw sense of personal celebration rather than the more ritualised celebration of a wedding, funeral etcetera – has a an ability to transgress social practices, cultural boundaries and prejudices. The celebratory atmosphere of a football match can create an environment conducive for communication and knowledge generation. It can provide an opportunity to communicate the complex understandings of HIV/AIDS. To break down prejudices you need more than simple instruction and education to bring about change. Alongside informative poster campaigns etcetera, you need public spaces where the performative actions of cultural norms – the physical interaction in celebrating a goal through hugging a team player for instance – help counteract rumours and any stigma attached to human interaction. The Beautiful Game provides this space. The space itself fulfils Cameron’s wish for architecture to be an ‘anchor for the community’

Cameron’s project opens up the performative sphere to visual communication – it allows more than reaction/interaction with its audience. By introducing the temporal framework of community the project makes possible a more discursive methodology for design. To quote from Italo Calvino again‘…every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in a dialogue’ (Calvino1974)

Calvino’s Invisible Cities should be on every designer’s bookshelf (or propped against his or her Apple Mac!). The novel describes a series of imagined vignettes told by the explorer Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Each vignette depicts an encounter and exploration of a city: 55 in total. Although a very literary novel its importance to design thinking is in how the author explores how we experience day-to-day life, not as a single experience, but as a layered one; the places visited, open up to the visitor – working on their senses. Experience is contingent on time and personal mood.

The role of the designer; the visual communicator is important, often pivotal in the understanding of cultural change – from the graphics of the rioting students in Paris1968 to the more contemporary movements like ACT UP (http://www.actupny.org/) - visual communication is part of the problem solving exercise. Problem-solving is often seen as the methodological bedrock of design and the semantic key to designers’ belief that they are in a position to change society. Social problems and design form a symbiotic relationship, something which politicians and cultural commentators alike have found alluring, leading many to a fascination with the role of design in contemporary culture – look at the United Nations and their poster campaigns since the 1950s to observe the importance of visual communication. But, while at best, visual communication can be the catalyst of social change; it can never solve the problem in full. Problem solving, for want of a better term, is always part of a holistic process. This collective process is seen in Architecture for Humanity, its projects around the world are small scale, and incremental in bringing about, or creating the possibilities for, social change.

I believe good design develops incrementally, and in an unavoidably globalised design community, good design projects bounce off other ones. In these small explosions of technical nous and creative spirit you will see the materialisation of recurrent social concerns – environmental issues, globalisation, consumerism, ethics, etc. – not as doctrinaire monoliths, but as small, individual investigations of – or obligations too – contemporary global cultures. The Beautiful Game - Social Change Through the Power of Football is one such investigation.

Colin Davies Ravine Lago/London 2008

Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities. New York,, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Office for Metropolitan Architecture. and R. Koolhaas (2004). Content. Köln, Taschen.

Van der Haak, B., P. v. Huystee, et al. (2003). Lagos/Koolhaas. Brooklyn, NY, First Run/Icarus Film,.

For further information:
Michela Liverotti
mliverot@benetton.it
tel. +39 0422 516272
fax. +39 0422 516347
Fabrica, Via Ferrarezza
31020 Catena di Villorba, Treviso

Cameron Sinclair

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Cameron Sinclair and Colin Davies