The Architectural Association School of Architecture and Foster + Partners have announced the winner of the 2011 Foster + Partners Prize, which is presented annually to the AA School of Architecture’s Diploma student whose portfolio best addresses the themes of sustainability and infrastructure. This year’s prize has been awarded to Aditya Aachi, of Diploma Unit 7, for his project 'Haiti Simbi Hubs'. The project proposes sanitation infrastructure for Haiti and draws on the unprecedented need for cooperation between the Haitian Government and NGOs to combat cholera outbreaks.

 

A network of hygiene points known as ‘Simbi Hubs’ is planned, providing localized sanitation processes. Each Simbi Hub includes areas for lavatories, bathing, and laundry, as well as facilities for food storage and preparation. Water and sewage are treated on site and the hubs address issues relating to storm drainage and earthquake safety. All the elements required to build the new infrastructure are designed to be made locally, using established craft skills.

Hub distribution strategy

 

Hub distribution strategy.     

  • The rural to urban distribution strategy allows for water movement between hubs and promotes reforestation and self sufficiency.    
  • The rural hub is the focal point to agricultural villages – where the government plan to relocate some of the redundant population. Planting and reforestation is supported through use of grey water for irrigation.    
  • The larger suburban hubs provide water and sanitation clean zones in the dense periphery around the downtown district – this was the most dense and damaged area.    
  • Urban hubs are located throughout downtown Port-au-Prince – enhancing their surroundings, providing water and sanitation services and acting as public spaces in the city.    
  • All hubs are connected and flood sacrificially during hurricanes – quickly and naturally draining to the extended wetlands to the north of the city.
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: July 3, 2011
Cite: "Haiti Simbi Hubs Wins AA School and Foster + Partners" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/haiti-simbi-hubs-wins-aa-school-and-foster-partners> ISSN 1139-6415
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