Butaro Doctors' Sharehouses

The Doctors’ Sharehouses are MASS’s second housing complex and fourth project on the expanding campus of the Butaro District Hospital, where the firm first started working in 2008. All of MASS’s buildings on the site, including the Butaro Ambulatory Cancer Center (completed in 2013), have entailed community involvement in the construction process, employed local labor, and strived to inject as much money into the local economy as possible. “The landscape is one of the easiest ways to get people involved, especially in the places we work,” says MASS senior director Sierra Bainbridge. “You don’t have to be a skilled mason. You don’t have to have particular abilities. Everybody knows how to do planting there, and probably better than we do. In all of our projects, we’re looking for the opportunities where we can have that maximum community involvement to get that relationship with the place started very early.”

The three communal sharehouses accommodate up to five doctors apiece, and encourage interaction between the residents in communal spaces. “People are trying to use some of the techniques that we teach them while constructing these houses,” says Jean Paul Uzabakiriho, a MASS junior associate. “Some techniques are not typical here, but they are going to be changing the village in the near future.” And some are already influencing local construction: “You can start seeing a couple of building elements being copied: We’ve seen local houses with clerestory windows at the gable, which is not common, and was copied from Butaro Doctors Housing I,” says Christian Benimana, MASS’s Rwanda programs director. “But you hope that eventually more can be taken up: the door system and the window system. We hope that we can simplify them enough that they can be picked up by anyone, and perform.”

ARCHITECT interviewed psychiatrist Priya Kundu, who describes how MASS Design Group's second housing complex on the Butaro Hospital campus supports local and visiting doctors treating patients in rural Rwanda:

How long have you been in Butaro, and what brought you there?
Priya Kundu: I’ve been here almost six months. I’m a Pagenel fellow, through Harvard and Partners in Health (PIH). It’s a global mental health fellowship, and I’m accompanying the team here—there are psychiatric nurses and a psychologist—to see patients, both in the hospital and in the outpatient clinic. I also travel to health centers in the district. This is my first job after residency—I just finished that at Oregon in July—and I’ll probably be here until summer 2018.

Tell me about living in the sharehouses.
I really love it. I think the design of the housing is really beautiful. There are four of us in my house—a pathologist, a surgeon, and general practitioners—but I’m lucky to have my own bathroom. And the views are really beautiful. The only thing, and these aren’t even complaints, is that the floors get really cold. I have to always have slippers or socks when I walk around. And when it rains heavily, it gets noisy because of the roofing. It’s woken me up in the middle of the night.

Does it create community among the doctors?
I would say so. We have our breakfast and dinner together and there aren’t too many of us so we get to know each other pretty well. We are a little bit further from the PIH office and the hospital, and I think that helps foster closeness, but in the house that I live in, I still feel like I get a good amount of privacy because I have my own room, so I can have solitude if I need it.

Do you think having housing facilities helps make it easier for Butaro to retain doctors?
I feel like the housing is one of the nicest things about working here. Other locations don’t have housing as nice as Butaro and I feel like it helps to have a nice place to stay. If we didn’t have this, our only option would be the “bunker,” which houses the PIH offices and housing. They don’t have windows. Or we’d have to rent a place in the village, but you don’t know the condition it would be in, or if there’s hot water.

How does living in the sharehouses affect your ability to treat your patients?
It’s really nice to have creature comforts, to have a nice bed, to have your own room, to have a nice bathroom with hot water. I think it makes a huge difference. I feel like I can sleep well, which is important, and there’s just a sense of calmness about being in the housing. It’s quiet in the evenings because it’s not really in the village or in a big community. And I think those are all really nice things about living there.

Project Credits
Project: Butaro Doctors’ Sharehouses, Butaro, Burera District, Rwanda
Client: Ministry of Health; Partners In Health
Architect: MASS Design Group, Boston and Kigali, Rwanda . Garrett Benisch, Commode Dushimimana, Marcela Laverde, Sarah Mohland, Alan Ricks, Nicolas Rivard,
Jean Paul Uzabakiriho
Structural/Civil/M/E/P Engineer: MASS Design Group . Tim White, Christian Uwinkindi, Obed Sekamana
Geotechnical Engineer: Geoconsult
Construction Manager: Partners In Health; MASS Design Group
Landscape Architect: MASS Design Group . Sierra Bainbridge, Martin Pavlinic
Size: 3,715 square feet
Cost: $600,000