HOUSING CATEGORY WINNERReclaiming Heritage Students: Holly Au, Miguel Delso Paez, Federico Rota, Alejandro García Gadea + Carmen Gómez Maestro Faculty Sponsors: Renato D’Alencon and Luis Beltrán del Río Technische Universität Berlin

Industry Category WInner

Title: MOSAÏQUE DU SEL [cultivating salt :: engaging people + land + sea]

The 2010 earthquake caused a big destruction and made obvious the poor quality of the building standards used in Haiti. By the aerial views and several pictures of Haiti after the earthquake, we realize that most of the houses fell down. Taking a closer look, foundations and remaining walls can be found everywhere. The only heritage left now is the ruins! They tell us what streets, houses and communities were like. They tell us their story. The remains of what is left and the debris left have been a major obstruction to reconstruction efforts, but they have a potential value for the reconstruc-tion that we explore in this proposal: we will use those same materials, reclaiming foundations and re-using what is pos-sible from existing walls as a major design criteria, rescuing their basic typologies and integrating the characteristic Hai-tian outdoors lifestyle in a flexible design capable to adapt not just to our specific site, but instead to whole Haiti. We focused in the area of Bicentennaire, west of Port-au- Prince, near the shore, with many problems even before the earth-quake, especially infrastructure and sanitation.

We propose a new house to be built by reclaiming the pre-existent foundations and processing wall materials, building a 30sqm house that can be upgraded resulting in a final 60-70sqm house with semi-private spaces. For that purpose we develop a strategy for the remains: if the walls are still stand-ing we reinforce them to be structural to resist the weight of the module and we keep them; if not they can be used either for defining spaces or seats (tall property walls) or tear them down and use the debris as an infill for gabions creat-ing new walls with then. More than just recycling materials we also propose to reclaim the cultural heritage embedded in such materials. Having in mind that most of the cultural and social interactions of Haitians happen in open or out-side spaces (public and semi public spaces) with the spaces that the foundations already define we aim to explore dif-ferent levels with operations such as adding different levels of rammed earth to clearly define a spatial hierarchy, such as open kitchen areas (integrating a water collector tank), rooms, workshop space and multi-leveled courtyards, and provide a basic house toilet.

The house is an adaption of the basic Haitian “Kay” typology, made of a wooden main structure (linking with the pre-exist-ing foundations and structure), bamboo walls, double roof for improved ventilation and bamboo screen as a porch. It offers the possibility of adapting to different cases depending on what is affordable (just building the roof and defining the pre-existing spaces below it, to a fully developed module with a storage room). At the urban scale, the project contemplates also to redefine the canals (nowadays used as dump yards) by adding floodable parks for collecting water, using processed debris to build streets giving the site a better public space quality, both for the houses that still stand and to the plots for the new ones.

HOUSING CATEGORY WINNERReclaiming Heritage Students: Holly Au, Miguel Delso Paez, Federico Rota, Alejandro García Gadea + Carmen Gómez Maestro Faculty Sponsors: Renato D’Alencon and Luis Beltrán del Río Technische Universität Berlin

Industry Category WInner

Title: MOSAÏQUE DU SEL [cultivating salt :: engaging people + land + sea]