The Boston Business Journal recently profiled BHI’s Director of Architecture, Gerard Georges, detailing his path to a career in architecture and what motivates him to design healthcare infrastructure for low-resource settings. Read the full article here. 

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Gerard Georges is director of architecture for Build Health International in Beverly, a global health equity nonprofit that builds sustainable hospital infrastructure on the ground in low-resource countries like Haiti and Sierra Leone.

Title: Director of Architecture, Build Health International
Age: 58
Education: Attended both Northeastern University and Boston Architectural College
Residence: Hyde Park
Fun Fact: He is the least famous of his siblings: His sister is the former poet laureate of
Boston, his three brothers are a musician, a rare sneaker designer and a set designer for
MTV.

Gerard Georges is a citizen of the world, having lived in Haiti, Congo, Canada, New York, Miami and Boston and worked in many more countries. His love of architecture and experience working in so many different cultures combine to make a great background for the Director of Architecture of BHI, a Beverly-based company that builds hospitals, clinics and laboratories in low-resource countries like Haiti and Sierra Leone.

Growing up in Boston, Georges’ father — a civil engineer and a jack of all trades — would bring him around on trash day to find old TVs to repair in the basement, which had a wood shop and an electrical shop. That’s where he became interested in how things went together and how they could be repaired with limited resources.
“When I was in the sixth grade, my grandmother used to take us to look at cathedrals,” he said. “I was fascinated with them and how light enters space and animates it and creates textures and moments and experiences. That’s when I realized I wanted to be a person who designed and created those spaces. I told my father and he said I’d never make any money as an architect, be an engineer.”

Engineering became his plan, but when his father got lung cancer, Georges saw first- hand what depressing places hospitals could be. He also recognized they didn’t have to be that way. And a health care facility designer was born.
“The low-resource settings came from visiting my grandfather in Haiti,” he said. “We’d help other people fix things up. I was amazed by the ingenuity of the local people who could take things other people considered garbage and make something out of it whether it was something artistic or functional. Those things together really sparked my interest in trying to provide quality care in areas where people didn’t have means.” Through doing some volunteer work building health care facilities in Haiti and elsewhere, he met the founders of BHI and ultimately went to work for them. Today he oversees the design for between 10—20 BHI projects of varying sizes in low-resource countries.

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Read the full article here.