As architects, we are increasingly aware of humanitarian disasters, environmental, social and political, which impact vulnerable communities worldwide. Perhaps our screen-time has some part to play—while social media channels are prone to reinforcing our own situation and beliefs, internet platforms do have the potential to connect us to far-off events unfolding in real-time. Be it friends marking themselves safe after the Paris attacks, or a live Twitter feed of the tsunami sweeping across the Japanese coast, many of us feel ever closer, moved and engaged.

Despite a lack of reliable international figures mapping the architecture nonprofit sector (the statistics tend not to cross national borders), according to the 2016 Blackbaud Institute’s National Report, online-giving in the US grew by 7.9% last year, with the ‘arts and culture’ sector leading the way. In the past decade, nonprofit and other civil society organizations—also known as the ‘third sector’—are experiencing somewhat of a global explosion. To take a recent and well-documented humanitarian crisis, the 2011 Japanese tsunami, aid workers on the ground witnessed a surge in civil society activism, albeit mostly short-term. The number of ECOSOC-affiliated NGOs undertaking projects in Tohoku were totaled at 217, in contrast to the 20 organizations present when the Kobe earthquake struck Japan in 1998.

When a building is both ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ in equal measure, it is held up as a pinnacle of architectural mastery.

Researchers analyzing the growth of the nonprofit sector point to the global economic crash and recession of 2008 as key contributing factors in the rise of civil society activism in the architecture profession. When the financial crisis struck, many professionals who had spent the majority of their careers working in established firms were released from their positions. According to the US Department of Labor, employment in architecture firms plummeted from 224,500 to 184,600 nationally during the six month period between July and November 2009. In response, many unemployed architects began practicing as sole-traders and took on jobs such as local domestic work or offered their services pro-bono to charitable organizations.

Read the source article at Archinect