Nonprofit Quarterly’s winter 2015 edition, “When the Show Must Go On: Nonprofits & Adversity.”

Commentary: In the changeover from the industrial era to the knowledge era, networks have become an increasingly favored form of organization—they can spread an approach and learning quickly among communities of practitioners. In the case of Architecture for Humanity, an attractive idea brought people into conversation and common cause globally—and, when the original “hub” of the hub-and-spoke activity began to fail, the network quickly changed to a multihub system that is less frail but will require careful knitting. As Valdis Krebs describes in “Building Adaptive Communities through Network Weaving,” Now that other hubs are emerging in the network, the various weavers begin to connect to each other, creating a multi-hub community. Not only is this topology less fragile, it is also the best design to minimize the average path length throughout the network—remember, the shorter the hops, the better for work flow, information exchange, and knowledge sharing! Information percolates most quickly through a network where the best-connected hubs are all connected to each other. A network with many hubs is also very resilient and cannot be easily dismantled.” But, Krebs cautions, turf or political issues are a real threat to this phase of network development.

From 1999 to 2014, Architecture for Humanity (AFH) worked in over forty-four countries, built more than two thousand structures, served over two million people, and established nearly sixty chapters of design professionals around the world.1 Amid this success, AFH’s U.S. headquarters filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2015. This case study looks at the origins of, and factors that led to, the “death” of the best-known humanitarian architecture organization in the world. However, it will also reveal that AFH is regenerating via its worldwide network of chapters, which it had begun developing around 2004, and which gathered more formally under the name Architecture for Humanity Chapter Network upon AFH’s closure.2