Building a New Kind of Health Care

Michael Murphy was 26 years old, and deep into final exams during his first semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, when Dr. Paul Farmer came to campus to speak. Murphy knew of Farmer, who in 1987 cofounded Partners in Health, to serve Haiti’s neediest. It was 2006, World AIDS Day, and Murphy headed over to hear what Farmer had to say. He had no idea that the speech he crammed into his busy schedule would determine the direction of his life’s work. Farmer told the students about the homes and hospitals Partners in Health (PIH) was building in rural Haiti, Rwanda, and Peru. Murphy was moved. “This guy was talking about architecture, but he’s calling it health care,” he recalls. “As a student, I thought it was an interesting reframing of architecture as a key piece of the health care delivery system.”