STAFF AND CONSULTANTS (Click on name to eMail that person)

• Jim Poirier, B.Sc.-B.Arch- Industrial Designer- Architect and Director of the Institute-(English-French)
• Robert Bianchi, B.A., B.Arch. (English-French-Italian)
• Marcello DelRio, Arch. - Architect (English- Spanish-Portuguese)
• Nicole Beaudry, M.B.A. -Public Relations- (English-French-Spanish)
• Jimmy Gauthier, P.Ing. - Structural Engineer - (English-French)
• Luc Piché, M.B.A. - Scs.Pol, Financial Analyst (Paris FR)-(English-French-Japanese)
• Jacques Caouette, B.Sc. Industrial Designer -Technologist - (French-English)
• Ruben Mendez Paz, Construction Technologist - (Spanish-English)
• Eric Triesman, Attorney - (Recently passed away)
• Allen Huston,Construction Technologist - (English-Spanish)
• Javier Guerrero, Construction Technologist - (English-Spanish)

We are actively recruiting associate construction professionals. Please drop us a line here mentioning your related experience. Other skills in sociology, logistics, international Affairs, refugee affairs highly wished for. Weather scientists and experts to join soon.

ARCHITECTS

Because of their unique position between scientists/engineers and social workers/artists, architects are sometimes the best guarantors of the successful preventive construction as well as the secure rebuilding effort after a disaster. Because they take into account human behavior and local culture, they are well equipped to anticipate the use given to their building programs. Before the Indonesian tsunami, good architects had made upper floor balconies accessible from the street, thereby saving many lives when the high waves rolled in. In some cases, these resort stairs were accepted by the resort owners only after a fight, yet they saved many lives.
More and more architects working with our Director Jacques Poirier. Most have had direct experience with construction under extreme conditions. Architect Robert Bianchi (Montréal) was involved with arctic construction, Marcello DelRio (Mexico) did the same within the tropical hurricane context. Others including Poirier himself worked with Habitat for Humanity and have had African and Asiatic experience like him.

MATHEMATICS

Out of fear or malice, mathematicians have been banned from construction sites ever since one was decapitated by a Pharaoh to avoid the future duplication of a most successful pyramid. Masons and carpenters loathe mathematics, and it certainly shows: almost every building material measures either 2x4x8(studs), 8x8x16(cinder blocks), 4x8 feet(sheatings of all kinds).
One could conclude that the multiplication x2 is the only intellectuality tolerated on a building site. As a result, everything built ends up rectangular. The average house has 16,000 ninety degree angles collecting dust.
Now if any of these otherwise fine tradesmen knew by heart the square root of three , they could actually build hexagonal floor plans and stop creating wasteful corners ! More to the point, they could actually graduate to rhombic maths where super strong space saving shapes could replace fragile orthogonal structures. When not perfectly built, these can skew, warp, twist and also get buffeted by strong winds. There are no large cubic structures in nature. Having a third horizontal axis as with hexagonal grid does wonders for earthquake and wind resistance. And to think! the bees have had that figured out hundreds of millions years ago*.


Note: Sure, you can approximate an hexagon by first scribing a circle and cutting down its perimeter at six intervals. But nothing accurate can occur unless you use a little trigonometry, the Tangent of 60 degrees, or...at the very least remember 1.732051, the square root of 3, a number that represents the ratio of the side of the hexagon to its narrowest width. If you visited the rest of this site, it will become obvious to you that from now on every child should remember 1.732051, the same number of digits as your average phone number. We can do it!