New Stories! Continued: Training the Next Generation of Rwandan Architects

To recap from the previous post, the Rwandan population is expected to double by 2020, reaching a total of 16 million in the size of Maryland. In preparation for this population boom, the Vision 2020 Plan establishes a framework for Rwanda’s development that aspires to transform Rwanda’s economy into a middle income state, which in turn necessitates a restructuring of the built environment. However, the amount of development is greatly disproportionate to the number of educated and licensed designers. Currently, there are no architecture graduate programs in Rwanda and no licensing program for architects.

Since 2008, MASS Design Group’s designers, Sierra Bainbridge and Garret Gantner, have worked hard to develop the architecture program at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) into a commonwealth accredited program. During the equivalent of KIST’s summer break, MASS had the pleasure of working with 4 aspiring Rwandan architects; you heard the stories written by Jacques and JP, now hear from the other two!



What interested you in enrolling for architecture school?
I have been always interested in construction and everything that goes with. My interest grew as years went by because what I imagined architecture was, became more interesting than I couldn’t believe through my university years. Now I’m interested more than ever in seeing an idea became a reality (a building) and that the whole community can benefit from that idea. I want to further my studies in Interior Design because the way we make our interior look is what make our life more pleasant to live!

Why did you apply for an internship at MASS Design Group?
After Mrs Sierra and Mr Garret presented at KIST what Mass was about and some of their projects and as I have heard about the Butaro Hospital; the design and ideas behind it, I felt like I want to be part of that team and see how they work because I personally am interested in improving people’s lives through architecture. I thought Mass Group was the best place for me to learn from different people with different ideas because at the end of my 2nd year I did my internship in an office with one architect and there weren’t much discussion. But in Mass, I found in there the team spirit, the sharing of ideas that have an impact on people’s lives and every new and good idea is considered. I knew that they were working on hospitals and I felt tempted and I enrolled and thank God they took me!

What did you work on during your 10 weeks with MASS?
During the first weeks I was working on the post occupancy survey for Butaro hospital. I worked on the weather station and on the Air Quality Infection Control Survey for the maternity and the pediatrics wards. In last weeks, I was mainly working on the Nyanza hospital; correcting some drawings and I also worked on door and wall details.

What do you envision your roll to be in the architectural community of Rwanda once you graduate?
Once I graduate, I will try my best to be the in between for the population and the government or the people with the money. But I have to work first on my speaking skills because I don’t think I am good at that! I want that people coming in Rwanda in 10 or 15 years to come, see the change and the improvement in our way of living through the architecture of places that we occupy. Not only rich people have right to our ideas as architects, also the whole community has to benefit from us. We are here for them. A nation is said to be developed based on people’s everyday’s life. And this goes with the places where the population do live. Developing a nation is improving people’s lives. Improving people’s lives is improving their way of living by improving the places they live in.



What interested you in enrolling for architecture school?
First of all, design is my passion. From my primary school, I liked to draw everything I saw on my way and I used to think about how I should change them until my Senior 6, when I was allowed to choose the faculty to follow. I found that my country needs architects including me. I need to participate in finding solutions of my country problems in architecture designing by context.

Why did you apply for an internship at MASS Design Group?
From the beginning of semester 1 until the end of semester 2 at KIST, I liked comments given by all the guys from Mass- helpful and useful. I like the fact that mass works with NGOs which vise to a large community interest such as, PIH and APIE. I like the way Mass designs for finding almost all solutions, not solutions that cause other problems. For example, Mass Design Group has hospital design solutions for fighting against airborne diseases.

What did you work on during your 10 weeks with MASS?
I helped with making woven chairs, cushions, and pillow designs for the Mass office. I helped doing triangulation at Butaro hospital below Men’s ward where a path from Butaro housing had to get the hospital. I did a punchlist for Girubuntu primary school. I designed built-in furniture for Butaro housing.

Why do you think design is important as Rwanda looks to enhance it’s role in the global market?
When I hear a word design, I understand 4 major things: context, functionality, speciality and innovation. Once we will be able to make our own things without copying from anywhere else, special and functional this can be considerable on the global market.



For more information about the architecture department at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology:

http://www.kist.ac.rw/index.php/faculties/160
http://rwanda-arcbox.blogspot.com/
Sarah Mohland - holds an M.Arch from Montana State University- Bozeman. She is living in Kigali as a MASS Design Fellow.

MASS IMPACT: Constructing Butaro Doctors' Housing, Burera, Rwanda

Follow-up with Libby, at Rethink Relief

Rethink Relief, a design workshop at the Faculty of Industrial Design at TU-Delft, has come to an end and it was a productive week for all involved. We mixed idea generation and design with insightful lectures about the design process and relief-related research going on at TU-Delft. On Friday we wrapped up with presentations of each team’s work, which were attended by faculty and students from all over the university.

My team presented our ideas for a more mobile, transferable water system. The driving force behind our design is the need to adapt rainwater catchment systems to any type of shelter. We want to pair a tarp with a gutter connected to many individual pipes that can be assembled over either a tent or a more permanent roofing system. Then the user can connect the pipes to any number of small water containers, such as plastic “pillow” bags, jerry cans, or terra cotta pots, which are easy to carry around. Reusable plastic bags would be an ideal way to disinfect the water with UV light. The containers can finally be stockpiled in larger rigid containers, such as the uniformly sized plywood boxes that Doctors Without Borders uses to transport supplies to relief camps. In this way, water could be available during dry periods in modestly-sized containers that can be used or shared easily.

This is still a concept that needs extensive development. My teammates David, Christoffer, Joana and I hope to keep collaborating in the future to develop the idea and get other people on board to help us make it a reality. Rethink Relief showed us that there is an extensive network of innovators interested in these solutions, and we need to tap into this network if we want to make real changes to the living conditions of people in relief camps and beyond!

The most important lecture of the week, for me, was that which asked the question “What are we designing for?” Lecturer Amy Smith of D-Lab started the presentation by saying, “THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS, THERE ARE ONLY TRADE-OFFS.” The trade-offs can occur among the following needs, to name just a few: Affordability, Usability, Manufacturability, and Sustainability.

And finally, my favorite trade-off: Failure. It seems counterintuitive at first to design for failure, but as a structural engineer you could say this is my primary concern. The challenge is to think about how the product or structure might fail, then make sure it fails in the safest way possible and the way that is easiest to fix again – because no matter what you might hope, it WILL fail. In an earthquake, for example, our goal is to make sure the building does not collapse and kill people. This does not mean the building won’t be damaged – there are no earthquake-proof buildings, only earthquake-resistant buildings. It is the engineer’s job to ensure that the building sustains the least catastrophic damage, rather than no damage at all.

A key motivator in designing our rainwater-collection system is to make sure it is easy to fix when it fails. There should be as few components as possible, and each component should be made of cheap, easily available materials that can be replaced quickly. For example, the pipes transferring rainwater to individual containers could be made of a narrow plastic tape that is used in countries like India for irrigation. The tape usually lasts for only a couple of years before it starts to break down, but its low-cost design makes it possible for people to afford it. It doesn’t require a large investment, yet it is still an effective material with which to collect rainwater!

Another lesson learned this week: sometimes the best solutions are so simple that we overlook them. Our culture’s drive to advance technology is often counter-intuitive to the needs of a relief or development situation. People need simple ways to obtain drinking water, shelter, food, and education, and these methods must be sustainable and applicable to any situation in which those people might find themselves. Refugees in relief camps can be stuck in those “temporary” camps for 10 years, 20 years, or their whole lives. By that time, their home is not a camp anymore: it is a slum. Engineers, architects, doctors, social workers, and other innovators have a duty to help these people now – not later, when they might be able to leave the camp. We simply don’t know when “later” will be, if it ever arrives, and we have little control over the politics driving that opportunity. So let’s work to simply and effectively improve human living environments as they are right now.

Libby Hsu- received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and two master’s degrees in high performance structures and building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She now is bringing her engineering experience to MASS.

MASS member, Libby, involved with Rethink Relief

Greetings from the Delft Institute of Technology in the Netherlands! I am here for a weeklong design workshop called Rethink Relief, the purpose of which is to build bridges between relief and development with appropriate design and technology. The workshop is held in part by D-Lab at MIT (d-lab.mit.edu), my alma mater. I’m going to share a few details of my time here for you!

When a natural disaster or political upheaval occurs, the conditions into which people are forced can last far longer than anyone anticipates. A relief organization might pass out tents, food, clean water, medicine, and other resources. But tents do not last more than six months, and one cannot rely on processed food flown in to a campsite forever. What if there is no land to grow one’s own food, or fuel with which to cook unprocessed food? What if the water source runs out? What happens when a tent disintegrates but there is nowhere else to go, and no new tents? What if an oppressive government forces relief organizations to leave, taking all their medicine and supplies with them?

Darfur Refugee Camp in Chad

Sometimes after a catastrophe, people become permanently stuck in the relief camps, which turn into slums that grow indefinitely. International development organizations have no control over the politics that may confine these people to any given area. But they CAN figure out ways to improve quality of life there for the long term, after relief organizations have moved on to the next disaster.

Or what if the two entities could join forces to do a better job of implementing both relief AND development in one go? Elizabeth Ferris of the Brookings Institute wrote, “In spite of hundreds of articles, countless speeches, and numerous conferences, the gap between relief and development is still far from being overcome.” We are gathered here at Rethink Relief this week to generate ideas and form lasting connections that will work to bridge this divide.

There are 25 people from around the world at the workshop. They come from a variety of backgrounds: Doctors Without Borders, universities, NGOs, engineering companies, and more. Some have experience in relief work; others, like myself, have more of a background in international development. I am one of three structural engineers, and there are also industrial designers, doctors, relief workers, entrepreneurs, economists, social workers, and others whose work cannot possibly be confined to just one of these disciplines.

As you can imagine, Rethink Relief is a fantastic opportunity to meet others who share MASS’s philosophy of Well-Built Environments! During the first two days of the workshop, we have gotten to know each other and formed teams to work on individual issues affecting relocated populations. My team has decided to focus on the issue of potable water storage and distribution. Of course, clean water is crucial to maintaining health in a relief camp, and healthy people have time and energy to improve other aspects of their lives. You could argue that clean water is the first step to overcoming all other hardships.

Rainwater catchment has been studied by many different people over the years. However, catchment systems often involve large clay or plastic tanks that are not easily moved, and can also be expensive (see photo below). In a temporary housing situation, people need cheaper and more portable solutions for storing and sharing water. Ideally, this storage design would be versatile enough for people to expand, take with them when they leave, or transfer to a more permanent home on the same site. Since one of our team members is from Uganda and is sharing his own experience with obtaining clean water, we are focusing our design on a system that might work well in a climate like Uganda’s.

Rain Water Harvesting Tank

Stay tuned for an update on our work at the end of the week! For now, I leave you with these questions to think about: What is the proper role of engineers and designers in a relief situation? How can we design solutions to improve people’s quality of life when they are in a temporary housing situation that we fear might become permanent? And how will access to clean water help a relief camp’s inhabitants create a Well-Built Environment for themselves?

Libby Hsu- received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and two master’s degrees in high performance structures and building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She now is bringing her engineering experience to MASS.

Jennifer's Update from Kigali

I had never been to Africa before joining MASS, but I have now been in Rwanda for five weeks as a new MASS Design Fellow in the capital city, Kigali. For the next few months, I’ll be working on a renovation and addition to the district maternity hospital located in Nyanza. I am excited to be working on a project that is part renovation and part new addition, as this is my area of experience from working in the United States. Hospital design is new to me, but I am learning a lot about it with each passing week.

Even though modernization in Rwanda is well underway, particularly in the large cities, many of the smaller cities and towns do not yet have the buildings or equipment needed to provide optimal maternal and neonatal care. Located in the Southern Province of Rwanda and formerly the home of the Rwandan kings, Nyanza is now the home of a district hospital which supports many smaller healthcare facilities and clinics in the area.

The existing maternity hospital building in Nyanza was built in 1931 by the Belgians. The exterior of the building has some really nice tectonic details, with a heavy stonework base, elegant thin concrete lintels, and a spacious loggia along each wing (shown below). The building was sturdily constructed and has a great deal of potential, but the interior needs some work to rehabilitate it and convert some of the existing spaces to different functions, such as a new neonatal intensive care unit. We are also designing several new buildings to increase the capacity of the hospital and provide a new operating room and pediatrics ward. Below is a photo of one of the small rooms where birthing currently occurs (it is not much bigger than what you see in the photo).

It is exciting to be working with MASS and UNICEF to bring this building up to better and safer conditions and construct new buildings that can provide the space and equipment that is needed here. One strategy that we have been excited to implement with this project is the use of solar chimneys to encourage ventilation, especially in the ward spaces. We recently completed our Schematic Design phase, and are now beginning Construction Documents.

On the drive to Nyanza and back, I have been struck by the fact that every square acre of Rwanda seems to be cultivated. There are 10 million people in a country the size of Maryland (and extremely few apartments or high-rises, which are found only in the capital). That’s 10 million people living in mostly individual homes with their own plots of land to farm in a very small country. As you drive through Rwanda, it seems like every piece of hill or valley you can see is terraced or planted or somehow being lived on. It is also interesting to actually see the people working on the land; most large American farms are planted, watered, and harvested by machine these days, but in Rwanda, you see men, women, and children bending over in the fields to sow seeds or collect the harvest. There is a close relationship between the people and the land.

One thing that I have learned after living in Rwanda for a while is what it is like to look different from the vast majority, and to be conspicuous wherever you go. But the stares you may get from the local people are more the result of curiosity than anything else, and strangers will smile and say hello to you when you pass by. Small children will wave and say “muzungu!” which means foreigner. Sometimes they run up to give you a high-five or handshake.

It actually amazes me how fast you can assimilate to a new situation. I’ve been here only a short time, but I have been learning the language quickly and can communicate with most people using a mix of Kinyarwandan, English, and French. Kinyarwandan, a Bantu language, can be difficult to learn because its sounds and structure are so different from English or the Romance languages, but it is very rewarding to be able to communicate with local people in their own language. It is also easier to pick it up when you use it every day to talk to store owners or moto taxi drivers.

My time here so far has definitely been invigorating, and I can honestly say that I learn something new (or several new things) every day, whether it involves architecture, preservation, healthcare, history, politics, culture, or language. I look forward to the next year in Kigali and all the experiences it will provide.

Jennifer Gaugler - holds a B.Arch from MIT and an M.Arch from Tulane. She is living in Kigali as a MASS Design Fellow.

Updates from Our Team in Haiti

We have broken ground on our first project in Haiti. This past week we began construction of a small shelter to house our CSEB press during the fabrication of the 36,000 compressed stabilized earth blocks that will be used to build the hospital here at GHESKIO’s northern site in Tabarre. In spite of its small size, this shelter represents a significant milestone for MASS in Haiti. This is not simply because it is the first built structure, but because we have navigated through language barriers, procured materials and tools, and hired a contractor and crew. It is gratifying to be moving forward on this initial phase of work in Haiti.

We retrieved the Auram CSEB (compressed stabilized earth block) press last week and begin a 3-week CSEB training workshop on Friday. To that end, we are excited to welcome Satprem and Amandine from the Auroville Earth Institute to Haiti. They will spend three weeks here with MASS running CSEB construction and design workshops, overseeing our first block-making attempts and advising on current and future projects that will incorporate this low-cost, locally available construction material. They bring 25 years of experience building with earth blocks in India and have given workshops all over the world – in other words, they are an amazing asset to our work here.

Our first few weeks in Haiti have seen a number of other exciting developments as well. We have established an office at the site of the TB Hospital we will be building for GHESKIO. From this location we can be directly involved in the blockmaking and have easy access to personnel from GHESKIO. We also made visits to two project sites in the heart of Port-au-Prince. The first was to the community of Cité de Dieu (City of God) where we hope to begin a long-term earthquake-resistant housing and infrastructure project with the support of GHESKIO and others. The second visit was to GHESKIO’s centre-ville location, where we met with Dr. Pape and laid the groundwork for a number of upcoming projects. We also spent a couple of days in Mirebalais conducting interviews. A new construction manager was hired and arrived last week. Quesly, who has years of experience in construction management in Florida, has already proved to be a knowledgeable and motivated leader.

Enjoy the photos of the first days of the CSEB workshop!

MASS Immersion at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

Last week, MASS wrapped up the first phase of our work with the Cerebral Palsy team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (CCHMC-CP). Our presentation to the board was well received and the next several weeks look to be busy as we prepare a proposal for integrating the various programs that play a part in diagnosing and treating cerebral palsy in kids from Ohio, western Appalachia and beyond.

Through a chance meeting between Michael and John B. and his innovation team from CCHMC at a conference last fall, an idea germinated for MASS to bring their approach to bear on a first-world hospital problem. John was inspired by our commitment to building better healthcare facilities and the unique strategies we utilized in doing so. He also had a particular program (CP) that was tapped for special focus and on the lookout for innovative solutions. A partnership was formed and plans were laid. The project finally launched in May with an initial ethnography and needfinding visit where a team from MASS spent three weeks immersed with the CP clinicians and patients in Cincinnati. Cerebral Palsy covers an extraordinary breadth of conditions and symptoms, with no two patients alike. CP occurs in about 2 of every 1000 births, or about 10,000 infants per year. Major difficulties include motor, sensory and cognitive impairments, thus requiring a complicated and comprehensive treatment plan to ensure the highest level of functioning and autonomy.

We were energized by some of the challenges we saw and the potential for the MASS approach to take CCHMC-CP from being a very good program to a truly excellent program. As an example of one of the problems we are tackling, consider the twice-weekly CP clinic: Patients come in for a 2-3 hour session and during this time see a veritable army of physicians including a pediatric rehab resident, nutritionist, physical therapist, occupational therapist, social worker, and various nurses in addition to the pediatrician. Depending on the patient, they might then see a gastroenterologist or orthopedic surgeon for further diagnosis and treatment. The question of how to coordinate the flow of these specialists during the clinic, prioritizing efficiency while ensuring adequate time for all to collaborate on a treatment plan and share information is huge. Currently, 4-5 patients are seen in a 4-hour clinic session. However, they hope to grow from 250 patients to 2000 patients over the next few years. How do we create a ten-fold increase in capacity while at the same time improving the quality of care? How can we facilitate the transformation of the formerly independent CP cowboys into a perfectly integrated CP pit crew (as Atul Gawande of the New Yorker described physician teams in his address to this year’s graduating class at the Harvard Medical School)? The solutions have spatial implications as well as logistical and organizational aspects and MASS are confident we can find an innovative way to meet these two difficult criteria.

CCHMC is one of the very best children’s hospitals in the world, reaching the top 3 of the U.S. rankings in various disciplines every single year. That MASS was asked to collaborate on taking their CP program to the next level is a validation of what we have believed since day one: that architecture is about so much more than the building. It also confirms another radical notion of MASS’s: that our work changing health outcomes with a well-built environment in Rwanda is just as relevant and valid in the developed world. Healthcare facilities in the U.S. could benefit from many of the lessons learned and interventions employed in designing and building the Butaro Hospital. With their buy-in and support, the CP and DSIOP teams with whom we are working in Cincinnati have been amazing partners in this groundbreaking adventure.


Atul Gawande

US News Hospital Rankings