Haiti Design/Build Summer Program
Program Description:
The Haiti Design/Build Summer Program is an opportunity for students to participate in a service-learning, research/design/build program in Haiti. There is an immediate and crucial need for safe, semi-permanent, fully equipped, intelligently designed classrooms that can be transformed into permanent flexible and multifunctional learning spaces in both urban and peri-urban environments. Our goal is to design and build a series of green energy, resilient prototypes on targeted existing school sites that can be easily converted into learning spaces associated with nutrition and public health - such as solar kitchens, on-site clinics, canteens, and/or demonstration gardens for urban agricultural production. The program for each classroom will depend on the benefits and requirements of the individual sites. We are calling our prototypes C3 Classrooms; where students communicate, collaborate and create with the community.
Students will attend seminars and design studios in Haiti and Portland and conduct fieldwork in Haiti. They will contribute to every aspect of the project: creating financial and funding structures, researching local history, analyzing community needs and priorities, procuring materials, solving technical challenges related to sustainability, drafting proposals, analyzing the sites, designing and building the projects and writing a short-term evaluation of a building's performance.
The program is designed to teach students valuable skills including research, environmentally sensitive design, emergency relief construction and materials, community outreach, passive solar techniques and earthquake design, while challenging them to apply their education in the service of others. Students will design and build a portable classroom based on a new material being developed in Germany and Switzerland - Swisscell - along with interior fittings and furniture. The classroom will create a first emergency response to the urgent need to re-establish schools in Haiti.
The application period for the the summer 2011 program has concluded.
