By Carole Hawkins, [email protected]
Building a hospital in Rwanda changed the way Michael Murphy thinks about design.
“In Africa it can be incredibly dangerous to go to a hospital,” said Murphy, CEO of the Boston-based Mass Design Group. “Patients can wait for hours in hallways that weren’t designed for infection control.”
Murphy, a guest speaker for the American Institute of Architects, Jacksonville, talked about building socially responsive structures in Rwanda and other third-world countries at a special February program.
His journey began in 2008 when, as a graduate student, he and company co-founder Alan Ricks volunteered to design and lead construction of a hospital in Rwanda’s Butaro District. The project launched Mass Design Group.
The Rwandan genocide of the mid 1990s had left a deficit of doctors, and people were dying of diseases for which there were known cures. The country desperately needed hospitals and a health care system.
Partners in Health and the Rwandan Ministry of Health teamed up to build hospitals and health centers, including the hospital in Butaro.
Extremely drug resistant tuberculosis was rampant in Rwanda at the time. Murphy quickly realized if they didn’t design the Butaro Hospital well, it might injure somebody.
“I wondered, if buildings could make us sick, could they also be designed to make us better,” Murphy said.
The team’s solution was an open-air design that would reduce transmission of air-borne disease. Instead of the standard two-corridor hospital, the team opted for a pavilion-style layout. There were no interior hallways, instead there were outdoor walkways.
Low-speed fans with 24-foot diameters were used to move air up toward louvered windows and germicidal UV lights were installed to kill microbes drawn into the upper regions of rooms.
The team also thought about other ways the hospital’s construction could positively impact the community.
They chose to build out of basalt, a volcanic rock found locally. Walls were built without mortar, using local labor. An industry of local stone masons grew from the effort, and they went on to build homes for doctors in the surrounding area.
“It taught me even aesthetic decisions have an effect,” Murphy said. “We were not just building a basic place to house doctors. We were building an environment that provides dignity.”
Mass Design Group would go on the build another hospital in Uganda, an outpatient cancer center and a health care university in Rwanda and a tuberculosis hospital and a cholera treatment center in Haiti.
What had begun as a volunteer effort turned into a company that now employs 50 people working in rural and impoverished communities across 10 countries.
In the case of Haiti, the 2010 earthquake had left a quarter of the population without access to adequate sanitation and a third without access to clean water.
The team located the cholera center in an area where people were getting sick and included an off-grid water decontamination facility as part of its design.
The demand for Mass Design’s work has increased substantially since the company’s beginnings, Murphy said. Many non-governmental organizations that never used architects before are now seeing a role for architecture as part of their service delivery, he said. That’s a good thing for architecture.
“Architecture about creating a system, it’s not just a product,” Murphy said. “Instead of think about what a building is, we need to think about what it does.”