-By Katie Weeks

It is a one-word rallying cry that grew from a murmur to a resounding call: change. By the end of 2008, it had grown into a capital "C." Now Change has come—to Wall Street and to Washington—but it is not stopping there. There is a tide of change swelling in architecture and design, as well.


Increasingly, there is growing buzz in the A&D community about the responsibility of design, not just to individual clients and end users, but also its responsibility to society as a whole. Heading up this movement of socially responsible design—or architectural activism—is a cadre of architects and designers who believe that the benefits of design should not be limited to the wealthy. Rather, they are increasingly focused on bringing design to those who may truly need it and are dedicating their careers to opening up these channels of practice. They are designing, in the spirit of the Cooper-Hewitt's on-going exhibition, "for the other 90%."

Positioned clearly at the front of this movement are John Peterson, president and founder, and John Cary, executive director, of San Francisco-based Public Architecture. "One of the things that we're focused on a great deal here at Public Architecture is bringing design into places that wouldn't otherwise benefit from it." Cary says. "Right now design suffers from kind of a class issue in that it costs money to get things that are truly designed. That's one of the things we're trying to break down." He continues, explaining "what Public Architecture and other groups like us are trying to do is truly democratize design in a way that still maintains all the lofty goals and expectations of the elite design that we were all attracted to in the first place, but brings it to a much broader audience."

While some nonprofit organizations like Architecture for Humanity approach socially responsible design on a global scale, responding to large-scale humanitarian crises from the 2004 tsunami in Asia to Hurricane Katrina's destruction on the Gulf coast, Public Architecture encourages and supports social responsibility on a more local level. It is the antithesis of the not-in-my-backyard mentality. For Public Architecture, pro bono work—which, it should be noted, literally translates to "for good," not simply "for free"—truly begins at home.

In fact, Public Architecture's first project, the Open Space Strategy, literally was outside its own front door. The project began in 2002 as an initiative within Peterson's eponymous firm, Peterson Architects. At that time, the 10-person firm was successful, but Peterson sought a different sort of fulfillment. "There was a interest growing within me—and, I believe, within other staff at the firm—around doing work that had a greater impact on our community," he recalls. To channel this interest, the firm conceived the Open Space Strategy.

At the time, San Francisco's South of Market (SoMA) section—which happens to be Public Architecture's neighborhood—was transforming from a light industrial/warehouse district to a more mixed-use community, and while the gentrification was successful, the area was lacking recreational open space. The Open Space Strategy developed from one simple question: If you added recreational space to the urban fabric of a city, what would it look like? Peterson Architects proposed reconfiguring the neighborhood's Folsom and Howard streets, making Folsom more pedestrian-friendly with generous sidewalks, dubbed Sidewalk Plazas, that can support outdoor activities and urban amenities. The plan was crafted to be implemented incrementally so that the Plazas are responsive, rather than prescriptive, to the urban plan.

This little internal project quickly earned city-wide interest, with support from the San Francisco Planning Department, Redevelopment Agency, and Transportation Authority, and financial support from the city's Community Matching Grant program.

The enthusiasm fueled Peterson. "It was really the early interest in that project that encouraged myself and others to ask questions. Why aren't architects in this role more frequently, where we're actually going out in our communities, using our skills and expertise to identify problems, and then proposing solutions to those problems that may be overlooked by other forces?" he says. Finding no organization to support and encourage the industry in this endeavor, Peterson founded Public Architecture. "In many ways, it was a naive decision to create a nonprofit that would do this. Naive in the sense that we had no background on how to create an organization of this type," he now admits. But, he adds, "I think naive decisions are often the most successful decisions one makes in life."

Peterson's next decision, however, was hardly naive: Recognizing that turning Public Architecture from a hobby into a functioning initiative would require full-time dedication, he hired Cary in late 2003 as the organization's executive director.

Cary was no stranger to the profession or the nonprofit world. Having studied architecture at both the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley, he co-founded ArchVoices in 1999, a nonprofit think tank focused on the future of the architecture profession. "I obviously went to school expecting to be an architect when I graduated, but somewhere along the way, I got interested in the politics of the profession, which I think revealed to me the limits of who the design profession and the design community really serve at a grand scale," Cary says. "John's generation," Peterson notes, "is going to change how we look at a design career, and they are not going to put up with the narrow view of what it means to be a designer that my generation and most of the generations before me would only accept."

With its official structure in place, the organization began adding to its portfolio. In 2004, Public Architecture hosted the Open Space Workshop, bringing together more than 40 San Francisco city officials and stakeholders to discuss the future of the SoMA neighborhood. Later that year, it also developed the framework of a fall undergraduate design studio at the City College of San Francisco that would evolve into another well-recognized project, the Day Labor Station.

Recognizing that many day laborers across the nation tend to gather on street corners and in parking lots with little to no access to even the most basic amenities of shelter, water, or toilet facilities, the Day Labor Station is a simple, flexible structure that can be deployed at these informal locales. A self-sustaining entity that utilizes green materials and strategies, it is crafted to exist primarily, if not completely, off the grid.

"The Day Labor Station is interesting because it is such a profoundly humble little structure, and yet, in that humble structure you're able to address some very complicated, far-reaching issues," says Peterson. "It tries to tackle preconceived notions about how human beings should be treated and begins to crack open some of the most powerful and provocative things that designers can address in the work that they do."

A full-scale section of the first prototype is included in the "Design for the Other 90%" exhibition, and recently, the initiative received the Silver Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction, an awards program that celebrates innovative, future-oriented, and tangible sustainable construction projects. (The previous winner was Renzo Piano's $500-million California Academy of Sciences.)

Another project that lives on is ScrapHouse, a 2005 initiative that involved the design and construction of a 1,200-sq.-ft. house completely from salvaged materials that was constructed on the front lawn of San Francisco City Hall. Developed and built in just six weeks, the project was the centerpiece of the U.N. World Environment Day in 2006 and was also profiled in a television special by National Geographic. "It was only intended to be a six-week stunt, but it's proven to have legs well beyond that as it continues to inspire people in a way that not too many other projects have done," Cary says. Adds Peterson: "I think the thing that ScrapHouse did, and that other projects have done, is give the average citizen an opportunity to understand that they can see, interact with, and impact their physical surroundings, and that their needs and wishes combined with designers' experience and expertise can actually lead to a better life, a healthier world, a more sustainable world, and, dare we say, a happier world."

Indeed, while Public Architecture's projects may focus on a local scale, together they are shepherding global change. Consider the growing reach of The 1%. When it first launched in 2005, The 1% was simply an effort to establish a baseline understanding of the public interest architecture and design already underway in the industry. "We began to realize that if we were going to engage the design community as a whole, we needed to have another vehicle than the series of projects we did. The program was a tool to help institutionalize firms' public interest work," Cary says. Through the program, Public Architecture began seeking pledges from firms—specifically 1 percent of their time—for pro bono work.

The name of the program may be deceiving as 1 percent is hardly as little as it sounds. "It's a small number by itself," Cary admits. However, he explains, "if you put together lots of 1 percent offerings or donations from firms, it adds up significantly. So 1 percent amounts to 20 hours per employee per year, and if every architecture professional in the country were to pledge this percentage of their time, it would effectively be creating a 2,500-person firm—the equivalent of an HOK, for example—working full time for the public good. And that equates to about five million hours annually. We think there's a lot that you can do with that." Indeed, the first year, it garnered over 20,000 pledged hours (valued at more than $2 million) and to date The 1% has recruited 400 firms, large and small, pledging about 200,000 hours.

The program has since expanded to include a matching component, opening up to nonprofits that are seeking design assistance but are unsure of how to approach firms. "While the initial idea was that firms would go out in their communities and initiate projects in the same way that Public Architecture did when it was founded, we also found a lot of firms just didn't know how to take the next step," Cary explains. "Most firms, AIA chapters, schools, and other entities that could potentially be offering pro bono services had no structure in place for fielding, cataloguing, documenting, and ultimately executing requests. That's where the second phase of The 1% developed."