Next planting season, instead of crowding into dark, tiny and wet spaces after work, eight migrant farmworkers in Sampson County will be able to shower in a bright, airy and spacious new bathhouse without much wait.
Designed and built by 14 N.C. State University architecture undergraduate students, the bathhouse was the major project for their architecture studio class taught by Bryan Bell, adjunct professor of architecture and director of Design Corp., a Raleigh-based nonprofit organization.
"I would never want to be inside or around that [old] bathhouse," said Matthew Brown, a fifth-year architecture student who investigated the old bathhouse, a tin-shed that was poorly ventilated, had no windows and offered no privacy.
Regina Luginbuhl, bureau chief of Agricultural Safety in the N.C. Department of Labor said that all farmworker housings are required by law to be inspected prior to occupancy. However, the old bathhouse in Sampson County had not been inspected because inspectors decided that more improvements needed to be made. "Hopefully this [new bathhouse] was an attempt to do that," said Luginbuhl.
Agriculture is North Carolina's biggest industry, bringing in more than $42 billion annually to the state's economy, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. With a total of over 300,000 seasonal and migrant farmworkers, North Carolina ranks fifth in the nation in the size of farmworker population.
The National Agriculture Workers Survey found in 2000 that more than 10 percent of the farmworkers nationwide do not have access to toilets at work and more than 15 percent do not have wash water.
Melinda Wiggins, Executive Director for Student Actions with Farmworkers, estimated about three-fourths of the farmworkers live in overcrowded conditions. As a result, many suffer from preventable health problems such as dehydration, heat stress, tuberculosis and dermatitis.
In particular, Wiggins noted, their bathrooms sometimes do not have showers--a condition extremely hazardous to farmworkers who need to clean pesticides off their bodies on a daily basis in order to prevent health problems such as poisoning and skin rashes.
To build a bathhouse that addresses the specific needs of the farmworkers, Bell and his students went to a flea market where farmworkers gather on the weekends to hand out potato chips, water and a questionnaire.
"A lot of them told us that they had no privacy and there was not adequate fixtures," said Diana Halski, a fifth year architecture student, who remembered not seeing any doors to the toilets or showers. Aside from a lack of privacy, there were no windows, no proper drainage, no lockers and low water pressure in the old bathhouse.
With these concerns in mind, the students expanded the bathhouse by twice its original size, added steel columns and concrete foundations to ensure sustainability, separated and compartmentalized the showers and the toilets to increase usage and added four more sinks to the original sink-less facility.
To reduce the cost of construction, the team built the bathroom floor using road signs from the Department of Transportation and used plastic cotton barrels for the roof. They also managed to acquire a donated locker from Cary Elementary School for the farmworkers.
Architecture should not simply be a symbol of social status or artful taste, Bell said, but a social solution to help people in their day-to-day lives. With the mission of offering quality and affordable design service to the many who do not currently have access to it, Design Corps has built over 50 houses for farmworkers.
The project was also a very important learning experience, Halski said, as it was the first time she was actually involved in building something real instead of training on models.
"It was meaningful because we are doing this for someone who really needs it," she added.
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