Esther Charlesworth

Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University and a founding director of Architects Without Frontiers

“There’s a great Robert Hughes quote I think about,” says Esther Charlesworth. “He believed that while people could live well without painting, music or cinema, the life of the roofless is ‘nasty, brutish and wet’.” Charlesworth has been driving the not-for-profit Architects Without Frontiers since 1998, its vision being to better the lives of vulnerable communities through the built environment. “I think we’ve undersold the power of architecture,” she says. “It can be a potent tool to bridge areas of chronic disadvantage, be it in Indigenous communities in Australia or beleaguered communities in Bangladesh.”

A trip to war-torn Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mid-’90s set the Melbourne-based Charlesworth on this path. “It got me thinking, what’s the role of architecture after disaster and where were the architects? There was a feeling that we were just working on urban beautification schemes but we could be part of an instrumental reconciliation program.”

The experience sparked an idea that led to AWF designing and helping to build 43 health and education projects in 12 countries, in collaboration with local communities and NGOs. The project she is most proud of? The Dien Ban Disability Day Centre in central Vietnam, a 2008 effort to “meet the urgent health, physiotherapy and educational needs of children whose lives have been damaged by the impact of Agent Orange in the soil, left over from the war. It embodies many of AWF’s core values, providing both ‘a roof overhead’ as well as a facility that enables families to regain their livelihoods, as they are not looking after their children 24/7.”

With bushfires, floods, chronic poverty and rising sea levels across the world, Charlesworth, who’s inspired by “people who’ve thought about how you put ethics into action”, believes “that design has a role to play in our big global challenges”.