title: Lakou House
location: Port-au-Prince, Haiti
use: Residence
size: 235 sqm
number of stories: 1
structure: Wood
concept period: 2010
Lakou House is a housing prototype for PLWHA that explores the uses of architecture as a medium to support and foster healing. The words for home and community are close, and “lakou” can mean the network of people involved in the characteristically Haitian system of group living and sharing responsibility, as well as the compound or garden they share. This shared space and shared labor of love will greatly enhance the process of healing. Encourage families to cultivate and take responsibility for plants that could be therapeutic as well as providing food, nurture and building material. The idea of “weaving” together a circle of life is a metaphor central to this house. The house and its surrounding, as well as the architecture and furniture, is reflective of the “lakou” – a place with many layers of symbolic meaning for Haitians.