Haiti’s earthquake in January the 12th 2010, killed thousands of people but it wasn’t just the quake that caused the disaster. Being always a poor country Haiti and Haitians were lacking the skills, the fund and the training to build housing and social buildings which would be strong enough to withstand a natural disaster.The earthquake was a strong affirmation that industrial and imported materials such as concrete, function badly in the country when people built weak structures, with wrong mixtures and bad quality of materials leading to this major destruction to the country’s built environment.
My intention was always to tackle both L'Aquila and Haiti by placing a building typology within the social context and the earthquake fault line vernacular. A communal building that would improve the social issues of the area and would possibly attract people to benefit the areas urban context and in another scale the buildings programme.
Within a context of scarce skills and resources but also Haiti being the country with the highest maternal and child mortality rate in the western hemisphere i propose a maternity clinic following the UNFPAs brief to the ministry of health embedding the use of straw bale construction. A local material with an earthquake resistant engineering aspect which can involve the whole community in the construction process and follows a sustainable production system with environmental benefits.
This clinic would affect the vulnerability of thousand of woman being pregnant or being targeted and also coordinate the provision of primary health services which is now missing in the impacted areas of the country.
In a total diverse scene in Italy i propose the inhabitation of the medieval wall surrounding the city by clamping spaces onto the wall. Combining the locations bold history and culture with the educational aspect i propose to rebuild the university along the wall , again by using strawbale construction since the community has an agricultural character and the need for an earthquake resistant defence system.