A blueprint for good

A new movement aims to change the world through free architecture

FROM THE SOARING steel and glass of Seattle's Central Library to the titanium-sheathed curves of the Guggenheim Bilbao museum, top architects looking to make a statement in today's urban landscape generally go for huge scale, impossible geometry, and a dazzling, futuristic skin.

But in San Francisco, an ambitious architecture firm is launching its own groundbreaking public space. It's called the day labor station.

The day labor station is a semi-permanent open box with a canopy, and it does exactly what it suggests: It gives the workers who gather at street corners and parking lots every day in cities across the country a place to wait for work. But it also does more than that. With an elegance worthy of a high-end design firm, it provides a place to make or sell food, use the bathroom, hold meetings, and store tools. The station uses green materials, and it can operate almost entirely off the grid. For now, it exists only in prototype, though a few cities are exploring the idea.

The station is the brainchild of Public Architecture, a nonprofit design firm started by John Peterson in 2002. With a simple structure, he and his colleagues flipped the idea of an architect's project on its head. No client came to them; instead, they sought out clients who had real needs but no money, or any sense that their lives could be improved by design. At the same time, their creation achieved what the best built environments around us do all the time, without us ever noticing: it found a three-dimensional solution to complex problems. It speaks to police, whose tendency to steer clear of day labor groups can make them breeding grounds for crime. It speaks to business owners, whose parking lots and sidewalks can appear unsafe or unseemly, becoming flashpoints of controversy. And by offering a shadow immigrant population basic human needs - shelter, sanitation, and a safe place to seek work - the station suggests a powerful idea for everyone involved to consider: that day laborers have worth and a place in the social fabric.

In the age of "starchitecture," where prestige buildings and celebrity designers reign supreme, Peterson and his colleagues might be making some of the boldest statements in urban design today. Their declaration couldn't be more simple: Good design can drive social justice. It's a message that borrows elements from progressive design movements of the past. But what Public Architecture and groups like it are after is also distinctly new. They are challenging their entire profession to take the high design standards usually reserved for elite clients and systematically deliver them to society's most vulnerable: to design hospital rooms that give the chronically ill a sense of control over their lives, libraries that will make children spend hours with a book, or simple structures that grant working immigrants new dignity. In other words, to convince ordinary people and those on the margins that architects don't just make giant, radical shapes. They can make giant, radical change.

"I think there's a lot of confusion about what architects do," said Brandy Brooks, the executive director of Community Design Resource Center of Boston, a local design nonprofit and partner of Public Architecture. "Does it mean you make pretty spaces? Does it mean, you put some nice gables up there and that's what it is to be an architect? Well, no. It's supposed to be about the health and safety and welfare of people, and how well this building you're in - your house or office or school - helps you live or work or learn there."

The problem, Brooks said, is that "people don't recognize that they have a right to well-designed buildings and spaces. That this isn't just an artistic service. It's essential."

With an ambitious campaign it calls "the 1%," Public Architecture has launched a mechanism for public-minded design that is fundamentally foreign to architecture practice - a national network of design firms willing to pledge 1 percent of their billable hours to pro bono work, formalizing architecture's commitment to pro bono service the way it has long been enshrined in the legal and medical professions. After a fledgling start in 2005, the campaign is now gaining major traction: In the last nine months, the number of 1% firms has shot up dramatically, from 150 to just over 400 firms across 42 states. This week, Public Architecture is set to release a new survey showing that more than half of responding 1% firms are donating 2 percent or more of their time. And the top criteria driving the kinds of pro bono projects they take on is social relevance.

Not everyone believes that architecture can follow the pro bono models of medicine or law. For one, architects don't make the kind of money doctors or lawyers do, one of the biggest hurdles the 1% effort faces. But the idea has pushed Public Architecture to the forefront of a growing movement among design nonprofits, think tanks, and scholars to tackle social problems from immigration to pollution to poverty. The Boston Society of Architects, the largest chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a major supporter of Public Architecture, has launched a committee to support pro bono work. And this year, the national organization that represents architecture schools will make public architecture its central platform.

If the quarter-million or so US architecture professionals donated 1 percent of their time, Public Architecture estimates, it would amount to some 5 million hours. That would arguably constitute the biggest practice in the world, a 2,500-person firm working full time for the public good.

"If doctors said they were only going to treat the medical needs of the wealthy, we would be outraged," said Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota College of Design and incoming president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. "But that is what architecture has done. And it's not acceptable."

Like the channels that provide a lawyer or doctor to anyone who needs them, Public Architecture has begun to carve out an infrastructure to connect 1% firms with a growing roster of nonprofit causes looking for design help. And it is churning out resources to nurture those connections, showcasing pro bono projects on its website and rolling out 1% user guides that read more like calls to action: "You could have been anything. You chose to be an architect. Why? Doctors save lives. Architects __________________."

All of this is the kind of idealistic talk that would have sent Public Architecture's founder running, screaming, not too long ago. "I don't actually come from a background of feeling responsibility to work for social causes," said Peterson, a high-end residential architect whose private practice, along with foundation and grant money, helps to pay Public Architecture's bills. "I'm very much like the students and practitioners who came out of design-centered schools: There needed to be a purity about the design. If you muddied it with a social agenda, or even with financial issues, it would dilute the design quality."

But six years ago, Peterson began to crave a challenge bigger than building the next $5 million home. He found it right outside his office, in a light-industrial warehouse district of San Francisco whose influx of new residents had triggered problems. The open space consisted of parks closed off by imposing stretches of black fence. There was little access to public transportation. And the zooming, one-way traffic on road arteries through the area made creating a neighborhood fabric literally hazardous.

As the solutions Peterson designed to these problems gained traction with the city - including innovative sidewalk plazas that opened up pockets of open space - it began to dawn on him that he could impact a much larger group of people not just in his neighborhood, but in other city neighborhoods experiencing similar problems. Hooked on public architecture, he founded Public Architecture.

"I actually still deeply believe in purity of design. I just think the issues we should be tackling need to expand," Peterson said. "It has to include social justice. And I don't think that mission needs to limit the design opportunity in any way. . . . The idea that all these other people may have an influence on the work - well, that's architecture."

But the idea of an institutionalized pro bono system is not architecture, at least not the way it is practiced today. Today, when pro bono architecture happens - and it does happen frequently - it is often haphazard, undocumented, and done on an architect's personal time, without the brainpower or dollars that an entire firm could bring to bear. And because pro bono is seen as do-gooder work, many firms don't call attention to it, for fear of appearing to exploit it.

That is the model Public Architecture wants to change: If architecture itself is the building, Peterson and his colleagues are trying to design the room inside it where systematic pro bono work can live. In that new room, they argue, pro bono projects will no longer be projects that firms shy away from advertising. Because those projects won't be special or alternative or do-gooder architecture. They will just be architecture.

"Our work is only going to be truly successful if it's actually considered mainstream," said Liz Ogbu, Public Architecture's design campaign manager. "If it's considered mainstream, then it means that the principles we're espousing with the 1% projects become part of any project, no matter who it's for or what it's for."

In some cases, the projects of 1% firms haven't just entered the conversation, their designs have won awards. In New York, a groundbreaking design for elementary school libraries by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and the Robin Hood Foundation earned national acclaim, using cutting-edge technology, private alcoves, and whimsical fixtures to create a sense of wonder and discovery, and draw students into its world in droves. In San Francisco, a project begun to increase security at a Planned Parenthood clinic turned into an award-winning partnership with Fougeron Architecture that reimagined ways to keep staff and patients safe while giving low-income women and their children an intimate and inviting healthcare environment.

And in Minneapolis, a radically new design for a children's hospital room by the firm Perkins+Will last year won a series of awards, including an international award for lighting. (In that category, the firm shared recognition with a four-year project to relight the interior of London's St. Paul's Cathedral.)

The hospital room project began simply, with a conversation between an architect and his neighbor. But the outcome - the product of a two-year collaboration with the nonprofit group Adopt-A-Room, the University of Minnesota, families, caregivers, and seriously ill children - was a boundary-breaking design of the space where kids and their families must spend weeks or months of their lives.

Gone were the comfortless quarters that poorly accommodated families, and the Disneyesque imagery that covered patients' walls, whether they were infants or teenagers. In their place, Perkins+Will built an enlarged, intensely user-friendly space whose floor plan allows parents to sleep with comfort, work from their kids' bedsides, and replicate a sense of home with a kitchen area. The room offers children a virtual skylight that can change the room's color or create a sense of day or night, and a "magic wall," an oversized plasma screen for movies, video games, and Internet connections to home, friends, and school. And it keeps the medical mission at the forefront of its design with, among other features, special sound-absorbing panels based on studies showing that quiet can accelerate the healing process.

Like other 1% projects, the room became a lab not just for innovative design but for the hard work of innovative financing among the nonprofit, the hospital, private funders, and the firm (Perkins+Will donated two-thirds of its time at no cost). Two prototype rooms are now in use at the University of Minnesota Children's Hospital Fairview.

"It wasn't trying to be an award-winning architectural project," said John Spohn, a senior associate. "We were just trying to fulfill the needs of vulnerable patients, families, and caregivers. Now we can look at this approach and how to integrate elements of it in other possible settings, like intensive care."

It's the kind of example Public Architecture likes to use to show how 1% can pay back dividends to an architect's practice - raising a firm's design standards, its business profile, its standing in the community, and ultimately, attracting more for-profit contracts. Pro bono work doesn't have to just feel good, goes their pitch. It can be a viable business model.

Still, not everyone in the design world is convinced. "There have been firms that we've been courting for years to come on board who are still saying, 'I don't know about this,' " said Ogbu.

But some design leaders say the consequences of not engaging in the public interest could be far more damaging to architecture's future.

"My answer to the cry of 'I can't afford pro bono' is, look, we are having our lunch eaten by all the other professions," said Richard Swett, an architect, former ambassador and member of Congress, and the author of "Leadership by Design: Creating an Architecture of Trust."

"This is a time where architects and the profession have two simple choices," Swett said. "They can continue going down this path of star architects and marginalize themselves further and further into oblivion. Or they can choose to become leaders who can solve the very complicated problems of society today. Not because these problems are all three-dimensional or design-oriented, but because architecture is a profession that understands how to integrate very disparate, competing interests into complicated systems that ultimately serve everybody."

If architects are going to emerge as those kinds of leaders again, design leaders say, it isn't just the way architects practice that will have to change. It is the way they are schooled. After training a generation of students to concern themselves only with theory, individual creativity, and, by extension, the pursuit of fame, architecture programs are slowly but surely beginning to get on board the public architecture train.

At the University of Minnesota, Thomas Fisher's students are learning a very important lesson about being architects: before they can be creative, they have to listen. After starting a project to help build homeless shelters, they began to talk to homeless people and discovered that shelters were irrelevant to them. What they wanted was for the police to stop taking and trashing their stuff when they drive them out from under bridges or tunnels.

As it turned out, their biggest complaint had a design solution: The students created highly magnetized packs in metallic colors that served to camouflage them. When the police come, their users can throw the bags up to the closest metal structure, and they stick.

"I actually think what we're about to see is the emergence of almost two different professions," said Fisher, whose students also collaborated with a private practice and the group Architecture for Humanity to make "clean hubs," self-contained ecosystem structures that generate electricity, provide water, and process human waste. They are now being used in New Orleans. "The reality is that no amount of pro bono can come close to meeting the needs out there that exist, because the needs are so vast. A public health version of our field is going to have very different clients and a very different business model. You'll be designing different things, but they'll be things that can potentially be replicated millions of times to benefit millions of people."

Francie Latour is an associate editor at Wellesley magazine. She worked as a Globe reporter from 1996 to 2007.