In December 2006, while in the throes of a final charrette at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, first-year student Michael Murphy took a break to attend a speech by the noted humanitarian doctor Paul Farmer. Since 1987, Farmer’s organization, Partners In Health (PIH), has been building medical facilities in impoverished countries such as Haiti and Rwanda. Inspired by the talk, Murphy approached Farmer afterward to ask if he worked with architects. Farmer replied that he didn’t see the need; he sketched his last hospital on a napkin.
“It was kind of an ’aha’ moment,” says Murphy, now 31 years old. “Here’s this internationally recognized nongovernmental organization doing massive infrastructure work. They could snap their fingers and get any architect to work for them for free, and they don’t see the need for professional architectural services.”
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