On Monday, 4 March 2013, Marie Aquilino, a historian and specialist in post-natural-disaster reconstruction, gave a lecture titled «Titanyen: Sustainable Architecture in the Suburban Development of Haiti». The talk was was aimed at students on the Master's Programme in International Cooperation: Sustainable Emergency Architecture, which is taught at the ESARQ School of Architecture.
During the lecture, Aquilino told the students about new planning tools used in the suburban development of Titanyen in Haiti. These tools include new work modules that emerge from pertinent manual gestures to become adaptive strategies within existing systems.
When undertaking reconstruction following a natural disaster, architects are forced to look beyond construction technologies and methods and learn to understand the government, the financial needs and the territory. It is essential for this process to include a good budget system that takes full advantage of the limited resources and capacities available and allows for a broad, coherent vision, so that reconstruction is suitable and stands the test of time. To that end, Aquilino and her team work towards improving this process every day.
Marie Aquilino is a professor of architectural history and a specialist in contemporary urban development at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, where she runs a programme that trains architecture students to work in contexts of extreme need and crisis in the developing world. She edited the book Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity (published by Metropolis Books, 2011) and currently forms part of an international team working on the reconstruction of Haiti.
