Jeffrey Boyer, a mechanical engineer in HOK’s San Francisco office, describes Project Haiti as a “three-dimensional textbook”. Indeed, our design team hopes that exposing users to the building systems will help them understand the structure’s purpose, maintenance, and importance.

Beyond this educational purpose, I think of Project Haiti as a three-dimensional storybook. It is the story of survival and perseverance, of rebuilding and restoring. It is the story of Haiti itself.

In the most literal sense, we are rebuilding an orphanage and children’s center that was damaged by the 2010 earthquake. The new building will be designed to meet seismic requirements and be fully self-sustaining for daily use as well as in emergencies.

It will symbolize the rebuilding of the construction industry in Haiti, the post-disaster restoration of the local economy and, most significantly, the restoration of child health and the perseverance of the Haitian spirit. These are lofty claims for a 6,000-square-foot building to make. Yet, when you see the work that Gina and Lucien Duncan have already done in their Fondation Enfant Jesus campuses, you will know that if anyone can transform Haiti, they can.

Fondation Enfant Jesus’ sprawling property in the region of Lamardelle houses a clinic, an orphanage, a kitchen, a school for kids from the surrounding community, and guest quarters for visiting adoptive parents. A separate community serves women who became amputees after the earthquake; there they take care of one another and learn useful career skills. Aside from classrooms, the school contains a library, a sewing room, and a distance-learning computer room. When I asked Lucien what they planned to do next, he replied that his wife, Gina, wanted to work with elderly people. Of course!

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When HOK was asked to partner with the USGBC on Project Haiti, a children’s center in Port au Prince, we decided immediately that the most appropriate approach to the project would require an integrated, multi-disciplinary team. So we assembled architects, landscape architects, lighting architects, sustainable experts as well as structural, mechanical, and plumbing engineers to tackle the many challenges and create an innovative design that will showcase sustainable building in Haiti.

Eric Cesal, Architecture for Humanity’s Regional Program Manager in Haiti and a good friend, gave us some invaluable advice before we began: keep things as simple and as passive as possible. Given the chance, anything that has multiple parts with the potential to break, probably will break. And, odds are, the Haitians will not have the resources to repair them. It became our responsibility to design with this in mind and take steps to reduce the likelihood of elements being rendered useless due to maintenance difficulties.

We began our work with a quick observation of the place. What is there? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? Haiti has a lot of sun and steady trade winds, as well as a moderate amount of rainfall. What can we take away from these observations?

Even before our site visit, we learned that the local power grid is unreliable. There are perhaps six to eight hours of electricity a day and those hours vary daily. Harnessing both solar and wind power will be essential. A building that relies on electricity to run incubators for sick babies cannot risk being without power. Therefore our first design task is to produce the entire project’s power on-site.

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This October 5, Project Haiti was announced at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre to an audience of 15,000 during the keynote at Greenbuild 2011. HOK is the USGBC’s official design partner for the project, the redesign of an orphanage and children’s center badly damaged in the 2010 earthquake in Port au Prince. The importance of this project was stressed by both the  USGBC’s Rick Federizzi and the official project video, which can be viewed here.

Project Haiti is a physical testament to the incredible work lovingly done by Gina and Lucien Duncan, founders and directors of Fondation Enfant Jesus. The Duncans’ mission is to provide a safe, nurturing environment to children whose parents are unable to care for them and to offer educational opportunities for families in the community. Programmatically this children’s center will focus on child health restoration and family planning education. Additionally, the team hopes Project Haiti – targeted for LEED Platinum certification – will become a model for sustainable building on the island.

To properly tell the story of Project Haiti, we need to go back to August 17 when representatives from the United States Green Buildings Council, HOK, and Adaptive Building Solutions landed in Port au Prince to see the site and meet the Duncans. Thrust into a culture foreign to us, we quickly realized that things in Haiti work in ways all their own.

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