David A. and David B. were in a bit of a tizzy. They had just realised that their hugely popular website for architects, www.archdaily.com , had generated clones in China. Their content was being lifted, translated, uploaded. They didn’t know what to do. They lived literally at the other end of the world — Santiago, Chile. So they sent mails: cease and desist, you will hear from our lawyers. It didn’t make a difference.

Then came an invitation to the Pritzker Prize ceremony in China — the Pritzker is the Nobel of architecture. Immediately they sent the “main clone, www.archgo.com ” a mail saying they were coming. Sure, he responded, I’d love to meet you. When they were fact to face, he said, “Look, Chinese architects really need your information. And you’re not giving the information in Chinese, so I’m doing that job. I don’t have a business model, I’m not making money. I just want to help Chinese architects.” The Davids were stunned. They understood.

What is it that was considered so important for Chinese architects? Let’s rewind a little, to the story David Assael, 33, shared with this writer over breakfast in Moscow recently.

Discovering urbanism When David discovered urbanism, or city studies, as a student of architecture in Chile, he felt a sense of belonging. “With the same time and effort that you need to make a home for a single family,” he says, “you can make a park for a lot of people, or a city plan.”

Later, when he began teaching, he realised that all the amazing projects his students did remained only on paper. On an exchange programme in Barcelona, Spain, he had seen an exhibition on the next 10 years of urban projects in that city. “It was the first time I saw an exposition about cities for citizens, not urbanists,” he says. Then he heard what ordinary people, such as his friends’ grandmas, had to say about a new building a French architect was doing there. It sort of resembled a cucumber and the elderly women were offended. “It looks like a big dildo,” they complained, it ruined the look of their city.

When he returned to Santiago, he started thinking about the relationship between cities and citizens, about how citizens had no clue what buildings and structures would do to their cities. Or even if they did, they didn’t know what to do about it. And so, along with David Basulto (“David A. and David B., isn’t that funny?”), a computer whiz from college, he started a website to give information about cities to Chilean citizens. They called it Urban Platform (Plataforma Urbana), and with the permission of the university, uploaded ideas that came from students.

It was 2006, about the time blogs were getting popular, and very soon, their platform with information from and about architects, became the most recognised blog in Chile! But they wanted something else – “a site where my grandmother could go and understand what was happening in her city”. That’s when they started taking the work happening in private circles, mostly to do with homes for high income people because that was good work “you don’t see on the street”, and loading it on the site. They hoped this way to raise the level of public works, and a new site was born, in 2007, called Plataforma Architectura.

Now, with the growing visibility of the site, it was time to get more professional. So they asked architects to send information about their projects. “If you’ve done good work, you want everyone to see it,” says David A. The projects began pouring in. Next, they approached companies to send information about products that would be useful to architects, and pay for it. The companies too saw something in this proposition. They complied.

For the Davids, it was like a miracle, the business model was not just working, it was working well. But the site was still not fulfilling their primary target, to reach citizens with information they needed. And so for this, they started an NGO, financed by their business.

Initially only in Spanish, they soon launched in English as well, calling it ArchDaily, “with the goal of having the most visited website for architects in the world”. Why that goal? Because, as David A. puts it, “The main producers of cities are architects. So if you influence architects, you can change cities.” And why should we change cities?

The numbers game “You know, 2008 was a very important year in the history of mankind. That year more than half the people in the world began to live in cities. Now there are 3.3 billion people in cities, but by 2050 it is predicted that 75 per cent of the world will live in cities,” says David. “So the question for us is who is going to build housing, commercial services, hotels, hospitals and so on for 3 billion people in the next 40 years?” The answer is: architects.

And he shares some interesting statistics. The US, with a population of about 310 million, has something like 200,000 architects. India, on the other hand, has just under 40,000 for its approximately 1.2 billion population.

Among the best projects David says he has seen is the waste to energy plant of BIG architects, Copenhagen, which broke ground in March this year. Projected as “one of the most radical representations of architecture as a means of public engagement of our time”, it will replace Copenhagen’s existing plant and provide 97 per cent of the city’s homes with heating and about 4,000 people with electricity. It will act as a man-made ecosystem, harvesting natural resources and turning the city’s waste into its energy. It will emit its CO2 emissions not as a continuous stream of smoke but in sudden, bursting smoke rings.

Another is the Highline in New York by Diller, Scofidio+Renfro, a park built over out-of-use train rails. The project was pushed by the community, which raised funds, managed the design and convinced the authorities.

As for China? Well, the Davids are launching their China chapter in January, and they look to come to India a little later. So, 2014 could well be the year of the Indian architect.

(The author was in Moscow at the invitation of the Moscow Urban Forum, an international platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences on urban planning and design supported by the Moscow City Government and the Urban Land Institute.)

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