nner
HOUSING CATEGORY WINNER
Reclaiming Heritage
cultivating salt :: engaging people + land + sea]
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
nner
HOUSING CATEGORY WINNER
Reclaiming Heritage
cultivating salt :: engaging people + land + sea]
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
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 reconstruction that we explore in this proposal: we will use those same
materials, reclaiming foundations and re-using what is possible from existing walls as a major design criteria, rescuing
their basic typologies and integrating the characteristic Haitian 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 earthquake, especially infrastructure and sanitation.
We propose a new house to be built by reclaiming the preexistent foundations and processing wall materials, building
a 30sqm house that can be upgraded resulting in a final 6070sqm house with semi-private spaces. For that purpose we
develop a strategy for the remains: if the walls are still standing 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 creating 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 outside spaces (public and semi public spaces) with the spaces
that the foundations already define we aim to explore different 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-existing 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 preexisting 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.