LIKE millions of others, Nasruddin Gadeng, an engineer, is picking through the wreckage of the Indian Ocean tsunami. He’s in Indonesia, the country where he grew up. He’s not been there for ten years, but, he says, with a flicker of grim humour, “even allowing for my bad memory, my home town is unrecognisable”.

“Architects and engineers are meant to build things,” he says. “So when we see things destroyed — buildings, communities, livelihoods — maybe it hits us even harder than other people.”

The tsunami prompted an astonishing international response, and among the architectural and engineering community more than most. Across the world charitable organisations such as Architecture for Humanity (AFH), Architects without Borders, and in Britain, RedR (Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief), have been inundated by tens of thousands of offers of professional help. The engineering multinational Arup, for instance, has staff volunteers through RedR on three-month rotations on the ground, investigating the structural stability of buildings. In Sri Lanka the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is hard at work. He has long been interested in disaster relief, creating refugee shelters and an iconic community centre with donated paper tubing after the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

Even now a construction project is under way that makes that taking place in Lower Manhattan look like a house extension. And construction professionals feel perfectly positioned to help out.

“All this help is tremendous,” says RedR’s London director, Bobby Lambert. “The challenge, though, is to find the best way to help.”

Money is always welcome, and architects and engineers have been generous. AFH alone has already raised $140,000 (£75,000), 10 per cent of it from the American Institute of Architects. In New York, it is also organising Spice — an exhibition and anonymous silent auction of photography of the affected areas, donated by celebs such as Francis Ford Coppola, photographers such as Martin Parr and ordinary Joes like you and me.

Professional help for the reconstruction, though, is in demand. “It’s just about targeting the right sort to the right places,” says Craig Williams, the director of the North American chapter of Architects without Borders. “You don’t want to be air-freighting in help that displaces local people, local ways of doing things. The countries themselves should manage the response. These are not helpless people at the receiving end of our largesse.”

Knowledge of architecture and engineering varies widely across the 15 countries affected. India, say, is perfectly well equipped with expertise; while Somalia may be less affected by the tsunami but has fewer engineering and architectural skills.

Coastlines are already cloaked in tarpaulin and bamboo tents or ready-made flat-packed prefab housing. “But temporary shelters aren’t the problem,” Williams says. “It’s the slow process of rebuilding permanently that’s troubling.”

Many are worried about the prospect of the temporary soon becoming permanent, the emergency tent and prefab cities of today the shanty towns of the future. In Jamaica people are still living in emergency housing 30 years after a hurricane battered the island. “Get them out of tents as quickly as possible and into a solid structure back in the old towns,” Williams says. This can be as quick and cheap as prefabs. “But more permanent settlements help so much with the recovery from trauma.”

“What we don’t want are cookie-cutter solutions,” says Farshad Rastegar, the executive director of Relief International, one of America’s foremost disaster NGOs. “There’s a lot of money to be made from, say, a glut of prefab homes, which in themselves also cost a lot of money to make and transport. In Azerbaijan there are whole settlements of prefabs sitting empty.”

Worse still is the prospect of rushing to plaster devastated coastlines with more devastation in the form of massive developments more focused on tourists than locals, in the mistaken belief that it will jump-start shattered economies.

Grassroots reconstruction is the only real answer, Williams thinks, even if it takes a little longer than whacking up some concrete towers. AFH has been given the job by the Government of Sri Lanka of rebuilding — with locally based construction techniques and community participation — the 17.5 acre hinterland of Kirinda fishing village, where 77 homes were destroyed and 250 families left homeless. This means new homes, a new community hub, new security for the fishermen’s boats, a new inland fish market to avoid building near the beach, all while restoring and respecting the neighbouring Yala National Park and Bundala Bird Sanctuary wetlands.