So the following year, I decided to go to architecture school.

But there, I learned something different about buildings.

Recognition seemed to come to those who prioritized novel and sculptural forms, like ribbons, or ...pickles?

And I think this is supposed to be a snail.

Something about this bothered me.

Why was it that the best architects, the greatest architecture-- all beautiful and visionary and innovative --

is also so rare, and seems to serve so very few?

And more to the point: With all of this creative talent, what more could we do?

Just as I was about to start my final exams, I decided to take a break from an all-nighter

and go to a lecture by Dr. Paul Farmer, a leading health activist for the global poor.

I was surprised to hear a doctor talking about architecture.

Buildings are making people sicker, he said, and for the poorest in the world, this is causing epidemic-level problems.

In this hospital in South Africa,patients that came in with, say, a broken leg, to wait in this unventilated hallway,

walked out with a multidrug-resistant strand of tuberculosis.

Simple designs for infection control had not been thought about, and people had died because of it.

"Where are the architects?" Paul said.

If hospitals are making people sicker, where are the architects and designers to help us build and design hospitals that allow us to heal?

That following summer, I was in the back of a Land Rover with a few classmates, bumping over the mountainous hillside of Rwanda.

For the next year,I'd be living in Butaro in this old guesthouse, which was a jail after the genocide.

I was there to design and build a new type of hospital with Dr. Farmer and his team.

If hallways are making patients sicker,

what if we could design a hospital that flips the hallways on the outside, and makes people walk in the exterior?

If mechanical systems rarely work, what if we could design a hospital that could breathe through natural ventilation,

and meanwhile reduce its environmental footprint?

And what about the patients' experience?

Evidence shows that a simple view of nature can radically improve health outcomes,

So why couldn't we design a hospital where every patient had a window with a view?

Simple, site-specific designs can make a hospital that heals.

Designing it is one thing; getting it built, we learned, is quite another.

We worked with Bruce Nizeye, a brilliant engineer, and he thought about construction differently than I had been taught in school.

When we had to excavate this enormous hilltop and a bulldozer was expensive and hard to get to site,

Bruce suggested doing it by hand, using a method in Rwanda called "Ubudehe," which means "community works for the community."

Hundreds of people came with shovels and hoes, and we excavated that hill in half the time and half the cost of that bulldozer.

Instead of importing furniture, Bruce started a guild, and he brought in master carpenters to train others in how to make furniture by hand.

And on this job site, 15 years after the Rwandan genocide,

Bruce insisted that we bring on labor from all backgrounds, and that half of them be women.