• “Many ideas can change the world, but if you don’t build them they don’t count”

    by  • October 5, 2009 • Uncategorized • 0 Comments

    I’ve been a big fan of Cameron Sinclair, one of the founders of  Architecture for Humanity, since I first heard his TED talk. The quote above is one of his and really does a good job of summarizing some of the motivation behind 100kGarages.

    Now we don’t claim or expect that everything that’s made through 100kGarages will be a world changer, but some will be and we do feel strongly that even the simplest ideas lose their potential if they stay as just ideas and are never built. Helping to take these ideas from “virtual” to “physical” is what we’re all about.

    A great example of this is Robert Bridge’s “Shelter 2.0” entry in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Design It” shelter contest. There were almost 600 entries from 68 countries and some of them were pretty amazing designs, but Robert saw real potential in his entry and did something I’d bet very few other entrants did….he decided to actually build it! And in building it he saw some things that needed to be changed from the vision in his head. So he built a new-and-improved version. And it was even better.

    He could have stopped there and had a cool shelter in his back yard, but world-changing ideas don’t do much world-changing if the world has to find your back yard to learn about them. So he created the www.Shelter20.com website and made the design and cutting files available as free downloads. People will build them, the word will get around, and maybe someday his vision of digitally-fabricated emergency housing will be realized.

    And it would never happen if he hadn’t made the step from “great idea” to “great shelter”

    About

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *