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Industrial

How two architects are using Kickstarter to build hope for communities in need

Over the last few years, New York City architect Danny Collins and his colleague, Javier Roig, have spent their vacations building homes in under-developed regions around the world, volunteering in Cambodia, Zambia, and Nepal. Often, they personally financed the projects, which were typically building single-family homes in needy communities.

That’s how they got the idea to launch Project Latitude, a non-profit that creates products inspired and made by people in struggling areas. All proceeds from the sale of the products go back to the communities, where the money is used to meet the area’s construction needs.

“It’s our response to how volunteer trips are funded,” Collins tells Yahoo Finance.

While traveling in Ecuador, Collins and Roig were so taken with the area’s culture and natural beauty, that they made helping the South American country their inaugural project. 

Inspired by the rich colors and textiles of the Andean Highlands, they designed a backpack that they say reflects the lifestyle of the community. The backpacks are handmade locally, and all of the detailing is made from 100% recycled car tires.

To fund the project, they set up a Kickstarter campaign. On April 17, 2016, one day before it was supposed  to go live, a deadly earthquake hit Ecuador. Project Latitude quickly adapted its campaign to help with the relief effort.

“Our passion is in Ecuador right now,” says Collins. “And we decided that we are going to transition some of the funds from the Kickstarter campaign to help the victims both in a short-term response, as in water, food and shelter, and hopefully a longer-term response.”

Rather than building single-family homes, Project Latitude plans to focus on public works and recreational spaces along the coast of Ecuador. “We want to travel there and see what it is they need,” Collins says.

The Kickstarter campaign raised $12,500 within its 36-hour goal. “We’re not looking to stop there,” Collins says. “We’re looking to make a bigger impact on the community. We have high aspirations for the rest of the Kickstarter campaign.”

They hope to add more items to the Ecuador product line and eventually branch out to include volunteer projects throughout Latin America.

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African Architecture

Africa was probably the place where people first built any kind of building, because people lived in Africa before they lived anywhere else. But those early huts didn’t last. The first buildings we know about are from Egypt: small stone tombs known as mastabas, built about 3000 BC. Egypt was first, because Egypt was the richest part of Africa, where trade with West Asia was easiest. By 2000 BC, people, maybe migrants from Spain and Italy, were also building stone tombs all across North Africa.

By that time, the Egyptians had moved on to building pyramids. The Egyptians started building the Pyramids about 2600 BC, when the Pharaohs first became rich enough to feed the huge numbers of people who must have worked to move all that stone. Nobody knew how to build walls and columns that would hold up a heavy roof yet, so the Pyramids are solid stone: that’s the easiest way to build something big.

A thousand years later, trade and wealth were spreading further south. African kings and queens in Nubia (modern Sudan) built mud-brick palaces at Kerma. They couldn’t afford to build in stone yet, but they could build in mud-brick. The buildings at Kerma have many rooms, and show their designers experimenting with circular buildings and rounded apses.

By about 2000 BC, architects in Egypt learned how to build temples using columns. At first they built temples of wood, with tree trunks for columns. Later they figured out how to make imitation tree trunks out of stone. Even the stone temples temples generally had wooden roofs, so that the roof would be lighter and the columns could hold it up. These were more expensive than mud-brick, but much cheaper to build than pyramids, because you didn’t need so much stone. Egyptian pharaohs built many temples and palaces during the New Kingdom, around 1500 to 1200 BC.

People in other parts of Africa were building houses and temples too, but they couldn’t afford the workers to build in stone. They built out of mud or wood, and their buildings haven’t lasted.

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