Housing Design for Ex-Pat/Retiree

We were given the assignment to begin schematic design for one client type for our project in Fond-des-Blanc, Haiti. Our team chose to design a house for an Ex-patriate  couple moving to this rural area to retire.

In our design for the Ex-patriates we focused on creating a house that is peaceful, connecting the resident with nature. We emphasized this serene experience in the relationship of the porch to living area and the main entry sequence. Our group attempted to interlock the porch zone to the living area through openness, making the porch and living into a more continuous space.  The front porch is the large, to be used as a social gathering porch, facing the pedestrian promenade. The back porch is to be used more privately, reserved for family and close friends. We kept the public areas of the house very open to make the space feel larger for the user. We divided the kitchen and living with a small partition of bamboo to create a visual barrier without the solidity and harshness of a wall. We are still considering how we can apply this idea to other interior walls of the house. 

After our critique, we realized many of the improvements that need to be made in our housing design. One issue was how we had placed closets and bathrooms on the exterior wall of the house, rather than moving them to the interior for better cross ventilation. Another suggestion was to make one porch more prominent instead of having two. We also realized the need for another full bath for guests visiting overnight. Overall, several spaces in the plan need to be shifted and our concept needs to be brought through the whole house in a cohesive way. 

Young Professionals (Patriots)

The emphasis of this design is to create darker interior spaces and promote natural ventilation.  We saw this house being located on the southern end of the site on the riverside near the commercial zone.  A solid wall is located on the south elevation to prevent direct sunlight from penetrating the interior and to reduce the amount of noise from the commercial area.  The other facades are more open, allowing the user the option to ventilate or light the home.  The porches are located on the northeast and northwest corners of the home in order to promote the views and relations to neighbors to the north.

The kitchen is located on the west side of the home (the back) giving access to an outdoor cooking area if needed.  The house also has a "jack & jill" for the residents, and a half bath for guests.  Also, the house has a "fly roof" in order to flush out the hot air that accumulates under the roof from solar heat gain.  However, the design needs to be reworked.  The living room is too small and the hallways take up too much area in the home.  The bathrooms need to be adjacent in order to have a unified wet wall.  Most importantly, the design needs a more solid concept.

LLBen's Reflection of Design & Looking Forward

Crossing the Stream in Fonds des Blancs - Photo: Lauren Metts

m Photo Lauren Metts

After our trip to Haiti, we decided that our initial design needed several alterations to become more successful. Not knowing how much the extreme topography affected the site as a whole, we had designed homes that would no longer be legitimate to build. Also, we needed to take into consideration the noise coming from the generator the people of this community would have access to and how to deafen it. Being a new and improved neighborhood, the design of the kitchen within the homes needed to be altered to uplift and strengthen the notion of a more technologically advanced society.

Several key issues that we saw the need to develop further after our visit are as follows:

1. The placement of homes within the site and the probable conditions needed to be thoroughly thought through after visiting the site.
2. The homes needed to have access to a road or path of some kind for (at least) the construction purposes, as well as vehicular access.
3. The relationship of public verses private spaces needed to be designed systematically to encourage outsiders to want to come to Fonds des Blancs, which included the size of the lot for each unit.
4. The porch and its placement within the floor plan was a key component in the home. We also learned that the porch should be treated as the most popular room within the dwelling, being the main space inhabited by the owner and his visitors. The idea of a back, more private porch needed to be considered in addition to the front, public porch attached to each unit.
5. Access and placement of the public spaces, water, a generator, the commercial program, and footbridge needed to be dealt with by thinking as a Haitian would (who would or would not have vehicular access).
6. The diverse categories of housing for different types of people coming into Fonds des Blancs also needed to be considered as we moved from the site plan to the individual units.

With all of our designs, we had to keep the idea of the next phase of design in mind, Phase III, which included the airstrip adjacent to our site at hand, and would be a possible place to expand our initial design.

 Photo: Lauren Metts

One of the homes found on our hike