Over the past weeks I’ve noticed what I would guess to be upward of 95% of the construction I’ve seen (both standing and crumbled) has been made with concrete block, some parged, and some not. Anyone that knows my architectural interests knows that I’m highly interested in the way an architecture comes out of culture and place. The question I’m grappling with at this point, is what can be considered a local architecture, in a land where foreign occupation and aid-driven construction has been the norm for decades, or even centuries. Is any of what I’m seeing a reflection of how people live, and is it appropriate for the place? Or has it simply become the default — the easiest and cheapest form of construction provided by NGOs, much like the structures dropped onto the first nation reserves in Canada by our often less-than-concerned governments. To me, it is starting to feel like the latter, the resultant built environment having less to do with the local region and culture and more to do with the path to larger profits for the companies that parachute in to do the construction.

Before I go on, I want to be clear that I am not underestimating the complexity or difficulty of the reconstruction task ahead. It is a mammoth task, both in complexity and scale, with a lack of natural resources, lack of financial wealth, lack of government structure, and the sheer numbers of players. However, whenever there is a single-mindedness of what or how something should be done, I always think it is worth taking a step back to make sure it is truly the best way to proceed so the mark isn’t missed. It is often the best and most obvious solution that is the most difficult to see. After all, what is the point of building something if the solution doesn’t fit the problem?

There is, of course, a reason why sand, rock and cement is the predominant building material here – the deforestation is chronic and almost absolute. I’m sure there is a multitude of reasons for this, however there are two that are immediately obvious: the extensive use of charcoal and the aftermath of collapsed large scale mono-crop agri-business.

Charcoal is the primary energy source for a vast majority of the population, upwards of 70% if you believe the teachings of Paul Farmer. For most, charcoal is the only energy source even remotely affordable, and even at that, some research says that many Hatians spend upwards of 20-30% of their daily income on charcoal alone. And charcoal production, as with our canadian pulp and paper production, indiscriminately consumes wood – there is no concept of selective logging or clearing – everything can be fed into the industrial machine, leaving nothing behind, robbing the land of water an nutrients. However, most Haitians have no other option, so until a widely available inexpensive alternative fuel source is deployed, nothing is going to change, and the forests will continue to disappear.

The other contributor is the systematic regime of land clearing for mono-crop agriculture exports for products such as sugar and rice. At one point Haiti produced 75% of the world’s sugar, but due to the bottom dropping out of the Haitian export market, Haiti has become a net importer of sugar. This and the systemic fostering of resource dependency by outside markets for their own gain, along with other food imports as part of the ongoing aid initiatives, have all but decimated the agriculture industry here.

These conditions have created an environment in which wood is incredibly scarce, so it is not currently a viable building material in the reconstruction of the millions of homes and other buildings required.

So the low-hanging fruit is concrete. Apparently at one point there was a thriving cement industry here, one of the plants not too far from PaP. That industry seems to have collapsed, sometime after the Haitian government did a wholesale sell-off of the majority of the public sector businesses in 1999. Veniel, our host at the Wall Centre isn’t sure why the local plant shut down, but it is something I’d like to figure out while I’m here.

Certainly there are some advantages to concrete block construction. Block manufacturing can be distributed — apparently all you need is a block form, a pile of sand, a pile of rock, some cement and some water (hopefully clean enough to not affect the binding qualities of the cement), and somewhere to tip the blocks out to let them dry, and voila! You have a one-man manufacturing system (quality of block suspect, to be sure). But you still need to ship the blocks, import the cement, and after you finally manage to stockpile enough blocks for a building, stick them all together with mortar. And it still isn’t a structural system within an earthquake zone; that needs to be  done with rebar-packed poured-in-place concrete columns and beams. So that leaves the block to play the role of infill and shear wall between these elements. Surely there could be more efficient and less expensive ways to solve this problem. And once again – the cement source leads me to question intention – if it isn’t being made in Haiti (to be fair, at present I’m not positive of this detail), there is certainly someone making a lot of money from the sale of it. And anyone that has picked up a bag of it also knows that it certainly can’t be cheap to ship. Which adds to my suspicion. Is this yet another example of foreign companies and/or nations getting rich from someone else’s misery?

All that aside, I’m having a hard time believing that concrete block is appropriate for the place, based on climate alone. In this hot climate the uninsulated and often poorly vented buildings soak up the heat and become sweltering and suffocating microclimates long after sunset. Which still leaves me with my original question: why nothing but concrete block? What about tilt up panel? ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) systems? Stabilized rammed earth? There must be more viable options than this single approach to construction.

None of this changes the fact that cement is a hugely energy-intense form of construction, even before you start adding the cost to ship the vast amounts of cement into the country. And it also doesn’t answer the question as to why concrete block construction eclipses any other form of construction I’ve seen so far. There is no doubt that at this point in time the local skills are concentrated in this area, but I think that is likely because the default of concrete block construction is driving the industry, not the other way around.

I’m still hopeful that I’ll find a more “honest” architecture in the rural areas (which is probably the better place to be looking for it in anyway). I’m hopeful that I’ll find designs that have emerged from a history of people building by themselves for themselves. I have heard about the “gingerbread” houses in Jacmel, and a few in PaP. Sadly most of them shook apart in the quake (Jessica thinks that most of them survived, but I guess we’ll see when we get to Jacmel). But are they just a stagnant artifact from one era of occupation, or were they developed to fill local needs? I obviously  have more research to do – both on the ground and in the books. As always, I’m optimistic that something exists, and I’m excited to discover what it reveals about the people that have lived on this island over the past hundreds of years… but most importantly, how it might teach us how how to “build back better”, not just build back stronger.