Fighting poverty, by design
In the summer of 2007, Harvard architecture student Michael Murphy moved to an abandoned military camp on a remote hilltop in Rwanda. For the next six months he lived in a converted tribunal building, conferring daily with doctors, nurses, patients, and neighbors. The mission: build a new hospital with local labor and materials, using design concepts that prevent the transmission of airborne disease. In place of drawn curtains, closed windows, and unventilated corridors would be cross-ventilation systems, secluded wards with interior courtyards, and rooms sweetened by natural breezes. And in place of using outside contractors would be training for a local labor force eager to pull itself out of poverty. Murphy — who graduates today (May 26) with a master’s in architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design — eventually spent 15 months in Rwanda trying out a constellation of new ideas: that architecture can play a role in reducing...