The lack of educational opportunities for the youth of Haiti is striking. Those aged between 10 and 24 account for over 35% of Haiti's rapidly growing population of 9,104,000. This demographic group will shape the future of the country; however current literacy rates among these young people is little over 60%. The need to extend educational opportunities is especially acute in the Central Plateau Region where 3 public secondary schools serve a population of 90,000 school age students. With this vast and pressing need our design team felt it was inappropriate to focus on the provision of just one school. Instead we partnered with a U.S. based NGO with an operational headquarters in the region, they in turn respond to community initiated school committees established to plan, guide and manage the long term up keep of a school, if they are fortunate to have one built in their town. The final partner in this strategic plan is the ministry of education in Haiti, who will provide teachers to teach the national curriculum once the infrastructure and management is in place.
Presented here are plans sections and elevations for a school the team is developing for the town of La Victoire in the Central Plateau region of Haiti. This will be the second school the team has worked on and will demonstrate improvements to staged construction, and introduce landscaping elements that are either nutritionally beneficial, or suitable to be used in building construction, in particular bamboo.
As the team develops its prototype school, a number of floor plans, varying in size, have been presented to the community, the NGO, and potential contractors who would build the school, and manage local unskilled labor during its construction. The primary building material is a concrete masonry unit (CMU), made by hand, on site, with two different aggregates from two different sources, with the addition of portland cement. It is common for these aggregates to be brought to site on mules as there are no paved roads in the central plateau region. The portland cement, if locally produced, has no certification, although testing by the team proved it performed better than expected. With these considerations in mind the team developed two optimum spans for a prototype school building that would share common structural detailing.
The first school to be developed was for the growing market town of Pignon. It is projected that significant increases in the population will take place in this town in the next ten years, as the major road artery running through the town linking the north and south of the country becomes paved. In this context, as with many growing market towns in the region, available land becomes more scarce and the need to expand vertically has to be considered. However, the need to accommodate a second story has to be balanced against limited local skill levels, and inconsistent mixes of concrete that could potentially be used to build such a building. Taking these issues into account the smaller of the two floor plans was developed. The team fabricated a tool that could be used to produce approximately 500 blocks a day. The blocks were hollow, providing a thermal break from the hot tropical sun, and could be laid into "lost formwork" enabling a flat roof to be constructed without the use of difficult to source plywood shuttering and supports. One added advantage of the flat roof/second story system is that only the rebar has to be imported. All the supplies of sand, aggregates and locally manufactured cement feed local micro enterprises.
A larger floor plan, with a pitched roof, is proposed for the more remote towns in the region where land is slightly more plentiful and a single story building will suffice. As Haiti is 98% deforested, any timber required to construct a suitable roof would have to be imported. The team hopes to address this issue with a long-term vision to promote the use of bamboo. It is proposed that the school’s roof structure be constructed from bamboo members, and a cooling microclimate created, by the formation of a bamboo nursery on the north side of the school. On the south side, sheltered by the building itself, a demonstration garden is planned where students will learn how to plant and harvest vegetables that will have high nutritional value.
