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When Dr. Michael Workman, a Portland-area surgeon, decided to develop a new health clinic in earthquake-ravaged Jacmel, Haiti, he wanted the project to benefit local university students as well as residents.

Workman turned to Nancy Cheng, director of the University of Oregon‘s architecture program in Portland. The collaboration expanded to include UO students earning their master’s degrees in architecture, engineering students from the University of Portland, construction management students from Oregon State University, Waterleaf Architecture, KPFF Consulting Engineers and the Associated General Contractors’ Oregon-Columbia chapter.

The design process for the REvive Jacmel project began with a charette in June. A competition among the interdisciplinary student teams culminated Sept. 5 with an announcement of the winners during a reception at the White Stag Block. Now, the winning team will work with Waterleaf and KPFF to develop construction documents for the project, and Haitian contractors are scheduled to start construction in December.

Beth Lavelle said she and fellow student organizer Annie Ledbury admire the extensive hours that students dedicated to the project, as well as the pro bono services Waterleaf and KPFF are providing to help students learn through hands-on involvement.

“Annie and I are both very interested in managing nonprofits, organizing projects that don’t have funding, and going out and getting donations to make it happen,” Lavelle said.

“We’re getting a lot of learning experience out of it, and also the satisfaction of thinking that if we hadn’t taken it up then maybe this project wouldn’t have happened.”

The winning team includes Jackie Davis, Grace Aaraj and Matt Derapse. Their design features interactive community spaces, shaded outdoor areas and a flexible slope orientation, and calls for the use of only local resources. Aaraj said the project was challenging because they knew so little about Jacmel.

“Google Earth didn’t help, so we extended our research to documentaries, talking to people and a kind of role play where we imagined being a citizen there,” she said. “What will we need? What would make us feel safe and cared for? What is life like before the earthquake? How is life after it?”

“It was more like a recipe where we must fulfill functional requirements, and be ‘limited’ to the local materials and craftsmanship,” Aaraj added. “Towards the end we learned that we were not limited by these factors, but rather inspired.”

Davis said the project taught her a lot about Haiti and its building culture, and left an impression of what Haitian contractors are able to accomplish with so few resources.

“It almost made the process clearer for us,” she said. “By following the customs of what Haitians knew and had to work with and sticking to their cultural expression through architecture, we were able to provide a functional building that really met the needs of the client and the community.”

While it was a learning curve to design a project with teammates based in different locales, they were able to get a lot done within a condensed time frame, Davis said. A past volunteer trip to Honduras with Global Architecture Brigades revealed the constraints of time, labor and budget that impacted REvive Jacmel as well, she said.

“The realities of the project are what always keep me grounded in my design process,” she said. “I think this translates well into a working firm practice because if you are grounded in the realities of the project, you can more effectively create a solution that meets everyone’s expectations. I hope to carry on this type of practice in my future career.”