For the Haiti Challenge, the Architecture for Humanity team provided on-the-ground reports from Haiti.
As is often the case in architecture, the Haiti Rebuilding Center working on our schools passes building designs to construction contractors who value the work and materials needed for the project and rely on those values as the terms of an agreement to do the job. This gives us the opportunity to evaluate precisely where Students Rebuild funds are going, through cost breakdowns proffered by the contractor. If you’re as excited about cost breakdowns as we are, read on!
The Dignité School project is a two-classroom extension–a project awarded to the contracting company BECEI to be built for around $75,000. BECEI has priced out every aspect of construction, and their work serves as a good example for construction costs in general for permanent schools in Haiti.
From the contractor’s report, you can break down the costs of a school as follows:
- Construction materials amount to 56% of the overall cost (details below);
- Transportation of materials equal to 11%;
- Administrative costs (including tools, worker accommodations, and site safety measures) total 19%;
- Salaries (for “all disciplines necessary to complete the work”) amount to 6.6%; and
- Profits (needed by the company to pursue future projects) amount to 7.8% of a building’s cost.
(The other Students Rebuild schools will each be more expensive, and expansive, than Dignité. In addition to its smaller scope, Dignité does not require any demolition before construction or any additional latrines, and its build crew will be smaller. These aspects will add to costs for the other schools but the proportions of the cost breakdown will be about the same.)
Construction materials constitute over half of the overall costs for a building, as well they should. BECEI further breaks down costs into parts of the building and then again price out each element specified in the architectural drawings–from the sheet roofing to the doorknobs to the clean water needed for concrete. BECEI breaks Dignité out into the following (rather standard) parts:
- Substructure – the building’s foundation, steel-reinforced concrete, and stone supports going into the ground
- Superstructure – floor slab, walls, door and window frames and formwork, and more steel reinforcement
- Roofing (“toiture”) – including sheets and wood-framed trusses
- Doors and windows – and window screens
- Special work – which includes all the random extras: water catchment tanks and chlorination, gutters, finishes and crepissage, paint, plants, and furniture. Some of these elements may not be included in a contractor’s bid, and help determine what we pay for as part of the bidding contractor’s commitment.
(For Dignité, the foundations, superstructure, roofing and special work all take about a quarter of the cost of materials (22-27%), leaving some space for the doors & windows aspect which takes considerably less (6%).)
What these numbers don’t cover for Dignité are the separate contracts issued for soils and site surveys preceding most of the design work. Of course, that’s another can of worms.
