This month we have been super busy with infrastructure work so that we can host a Creole Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in June 2013.

Firstly, a 70 year old architect came to build an amazing structure that he designed, built efficiently from locally available materials that gives excellent ventilation and can also survive a hurricane or earthquake. We liked the design so much, http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects/kreole_house, that we decided to build two.

We decided to place them in the back of our land where we have a big plate of bedrock that would be ideal for the huts to stand firmly on. Also in our overall site design the growing food forest will soon provide privacy to the huts too. We then played with the orientation using a template frame so that we got the best airflow through the huts from the natural site winds.

Setting the hut template with Bernard Fredette, the architect, in red shorts and the two Haitian young men that we trained to build more in the future

Once we were happy with the design we started to build, first the cement plate and then the wooden structure.

Building the wooden frame and sleeping lofts

As you can see from above it is a wooden structure of 2″ by 4″s.  It has a central pyramid that has 4 tetrahedrons (a polyhedron of four triangle faces) on each side, the face in the cement you cannot see. All those a fan of Buckminster Fuller will know that these structures are extremely strong due to being based off triangles. They are pinned together with metal pins and rebar in the cement plate.

Metal pins that hold the 2″ by 4″s together

This main frame was then strapped with more wood so that the metal (Aluzinc, made from recycled aluminium) roofing could be installed.

The final pieces of the roofing go on

Here’s how they look finished in the landscape.

After thirteen days hard work!!!

The two huts flying to the moon, with our up and coming food forest in the foreground

The huts are designed so that four couples can sleep in the triangle loft peaks and then the downstairs can either be used as a social/workshop space, or we can put bunk beds and so house up to 24 people in each structure.

This could be your morning wake-up view, watching the forest grow around you…

After finishing these huts we finished the roofing of our main hut teaching space so that we can comfortably host the Creole PDC course with SOIL that will run from the 3rd to the 14th of June. If you want to come join us in our work and sleep in one of these great new dorms then email us for more details at sadhanaforesthaiti(at)gmail.com

The site: Kitchen on the left, main hut teaching space middle, nurseries to the right, dorms in the background and the forest growing all around us!!!