Haiti Chapel

Hope Health Action is a British healthcare charity founded in 2007. The founders of the charity have been working in the region since 2005 and set out with an initial goal of building a hospital in northern Haiti, a place challenged by the injustice of poor healthcare. The hospital was set up a decade ago and has now grown to be one of the largest in northern Haiti. It employs 300 staff members, has a number of specialist units including one of Haiti’s best equipped neonatal intensive care units, and accommodates a range of community functions.

We worked with Hope Health Action and architect, Guylee Simmonds, to design the new chapel, freeing up a temporary space currently being used for this purpose. The chapel was required to provide a new large space for services, meetings and staff training, and also provide several connecting offices for counselling and consulting.

The design of the chapel was developed closely with the architect in a tight design programme that required a solution considering all the challenges. The primary element of the brief was to produce an 11m spanning roof structure that would provide an uninterrupted space giving the final space flexibility for the different planned uses.

Seismic and hurricane resistance details were prioritised to ensure a robust final structure was achieved. The desire was to develop the design so that good building practices and robust details could be passed on to local contractors to ensure there was a legacy to the project that would extend beyond the building itself.