In the messy world of shelter, housing, and settlements, Graham worked tirelessly to develop coherence and shared principles. He communicated the significance of where and how people live, to donors, governments, and the media, as well as to the people involved in planning and implementing shelter programmes.
Graham was committed to learning, and to mentoring young, new, and local people. He was dedicated to research, to sharing knowledge, to improving practice. He was sceptical of innovation for its own sake, of supply-driven solutions, and of high-cost ‘best practice’.
While those around him might have been overwhelmed by the acute and complex demands, Graham could always be relied upon to be strategic and positive in finding solutions and was boundless in his energy to implement them. His passionate enthusiasm, incisive intellect, and warm sense of humour were applied to any undertaking.
Born in London in 1961, Graham described his significant early influences in Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working after Disaster:
Neither of my parents had a professional background, although my father was an optical
craftsman and ingrained in me an interest in how things are made and the skills, tools, time
and application required. I was also certainly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily an
equal place, and that hardships could be experienced by family and friends as well as those
in the headline news. My mother grew up in London during the Second World War, in
the latter stages of which her home was bombed and she had to be dug out of the rubble.
She was effectively an internally displaced person for the remainder of the war and having
lost everything, was dependent on relief assistance to provide her and her family with clothing and temporary shelter (Charlesworth, 2014, pp. 157–172).
After studying Architecture at Liverpool University and the Architectural Association, Graham worked for Michael Hopkins and Partners from 1983–88, notably on the Mound Stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Later he worked with Roger Zogolovitch and undertook part-time teaching at the University of Cambridge.
A great cyclist and adventurer, Graham embarked on long trips in his twenties, including across Africa and Eastern Europe and remote areas of northern Russia, seeing first-hand the diversity of locally built environments, from Soviet apartment blocks to African huts, as well as the extent of need in many places for better housing, facilities, and services. His experience prompted him to seek opportunities to deploy his architectural expertise in development contexts.
Graham made a radical career change in 1993 when he signed up to work for CAFOD. He was posted to Tirana, Albania, to assist with rehousing former political prisoners and displaced people after the collapse of the Communist regime. In 1996, he was one of the first humanitarian construction professionals to work in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) after the end of the war, living there for eight years and dealing again with displaced people. His subsequent global role with CRS saw him eventually deployed in Nairobi, Kenya, leading projects such as the rehousing of families displaced by the eruption of the Nyiragongo Volcano in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 2006, the IFRC was invited by the United Nations to form the Global Shelter Cluster, an inter-agency coordination mechanism to support people affected by crises by giving them the means to live in safe, dignified, and appropriate shelter. The Secretary-General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) sought to appoint a person with the best global experience in the shelter and settlement field. The search inevitably led towards Graham. Graham accepted the challenge and set up the Cluster, together with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and co-led it for 10 years.
Graham played a vital role in helping architectural professional bodies to widen their focus of concern to the humanitarian field. His contribution led to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) becoming a founding member of the Global Alliance for Urban Crises. On behalf of the IFRC, he supported the creation of the UK Built Environment Advisory Group, a collaboration between architectural, planning, and structural engineering professional bodies. In recognition of his engagement with the sector, Graham was made a RIBA Fellow in 2016.
As a strong advocate for research and academic partnerships, Graham contributed to the establishment of the IFRC’s Shelter Research Unit and partnerships with universities in Australia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. He was committed to accountability and collective responsibility, promoting the importance of measuring impact and outcomes in shelter interventions.
One of Graham’s greatest strengths was his unerring ability to analyse complexity, to consider the long-term consequences of any project, and to apply a developmental approach. He promoted a settlements approach to shelter and a multidisciplinary way of working. He built coalitions between emergency response and urban development, between education and practice, between businesses, professional bodies, and NGOs, between health, livelihoods, and housing. He always looked forward. He saw an urbanising world and urban crises as an opportunity to harness a wider range of actors and resources in humanitarian response, but he was also aware of the risks of fragmentation, frustration, and irrelevance and the increasing importance of coordination.
Perhaps Graham’s interest in exploring the wider context of every problem grew from his diversity of interests and his delight in relationships. His wife, Sarah, noted that he was:
extremely proud of the organisations he worked for and with, and the work he was involved
in. Most of all, he really enjoyed working and learning with people, whether team members
or programme beneficiaries. He also had many interests outside the office. His family,
books (his aim was to read every book ever written!), art, films, theatre, music, history,
and politics, getting out and about on his bikes and in his Triumph Stag soft-top classic
sports car, and watching a whole day’s worth of Tour de France, cricket test matches, and
endless rugby games.
At Graham’s funeral service, Tom Stewart, an architect in Berwick-upon-Tweed, noted that he and Graham cycled more than 17,000 kilometres together over the years, often sharing tears of laughter over the absurdity of the situations that they found themselves in when way off the beaten track.
Graham’s IFRC Shelter and Settlements Programme colleague, Sandra D’Urzo, underlined the rich human qualities he brought to his vocation and his commitment to the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement:
You always led by example: with your charisma, outstanding professional rigour, your contagious enthusiasm. You demanded much from us as a team, but first of all from yourself. You worked tirelessly, leaving your footprint in the major disaster responses, from Haiti to Pakistan, from the Philippines to African countries. If an initiative succeeded you would congratulate all of us; if it failed, you often blamed yourself and would try it differently. You would never give up. You would never let us down. . . . Be reassured that the legacy you left behind will continue and grow. Inspired by your example, new generations of architects will leave their well-funded jobs in London city to improve the living conditions of slums in Nairobi and rebuild after disasters.
Many more actors will join the shelter network you’ve started, and, in turn, thousands of families will have dignity and safer living conditions thanks to the alliances you built. Talented young professionals from less fortunate places will study in Oxford thanks to the scholarship established in your name.
Graham was particularly supportive of the work of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) at Oxford Brookes University and fostered a long-lasting and strong collaboration between CENDEP and the IFRC. Consequently, Graham’s family have expressed a wish to set up a scholarship in his name at CENDEP.
We wish to thank Graham’s family, friends and colleagues for their valued contributions to this obituary.
Graham is survived by his wife, Sarah Hargreaves, and their two children, Kezia and Joel.
Reference:
Charlesworth, E. (2014) Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working after Disaster. Part Three: Interview with Graham Saunders. Routledge, Abingdon.
If you would like to remember Graham Saunders by supporting a CENDEP student, please give online by going to: www.brookes.ac.uk/support-cendep
