Shelter History – a quick overview

Shelter is a basic human need – and possibly the most addressed design task in history. According to Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, the greatest concern is not the lack of design efforts. Rather it is that to many designers are doing similar work without learning from each other. To prevent us from inventing the wheel again, we have done some desktop research to get an overview of contemporary shelter design. Feel free to add to the list and comment. We like to hear from you. ‘

Tents and Tentlike structures

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Domes

R. Buckminster Fuller is by many considered the grandfather of humanitarian design. In his pursuit of “doing more with less”, Buckminister Fuller developed a series of groundbreaking innovations to support humanity, among them the geodesic dome.

Constructed of a complex framework of self-bracing triangles, the geodesic dome is the strongest and most economical structure ever designed. Geodesic domes have proven durable in hurricanes that have flattened traditional homes and they are so easy to assemble that an entire house can be built in a single day.

The Q-Shelter and the U-Dome

Manufactured by non-profit organisation World Shelters the Q-Shelter and U-Dome are two Geodesic Domes ancestors used globally in disaster relief and humanitarian projects since 1986. Recent uses include tsunami-devastated areas of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India, and in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Q-Shelters take two people 40 minutes to erect, weigh 120 pounds and are shipped in two 60-pound parcels. Two people can carry the 240 ft2 shelter to its site.

Global Village Shelters

Global Village Shelters are low-cost, temporary emergency shelters designed by Ferrara Design and Architecture for Humanity. Made from biodegradable laminated material they can last up to eighteen months. Prefabricated, shipped flat, and requiring no tools to assemble, they are easy to deploy. The first prototypes were sent to Afghanistan and Grenada, and later used in tsunami-hit countries in Asia; Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir Province, which was devastated by an earthquake, and to Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina.

Vinay Gupta’s Hexayourts

The Hexayurt is a disaster relief shelter designed by Vinay Gupta to replace tents and transitional housing. The construction is essentially build from a triangular structure made out of several possible materials depending on desired function – insulation, extended life, low cost, durability in extreme environments etc.

The Hexayurts is a free/open source design ready for local on-site production as well as industrial pre-manufacturing. More than the shelter, the Hexayourts offer an infrastructure package which addresses the needs for drinking water, cooking, sanitation and other essential services.

Container Housing

Sean Godsell’s FutureSchack

FutureSchack is a mass producable, relocatable housing unit made for emergency and relief housing. Efficient, simple and solar powered it is made to last and protect with a bare minimum of industry materials. Since it’s entirely self-contained, a number of units can be shipped together to their destination of need.

Earth-architecure

Mud Houses by Nader Khalili

Mud Houses are build using an construction technique called Super Adobe developed by architect Nader Khalili. The technique use sand bags, mud and barbed wire to build emergency shelters in areas affected by natural and man-made disasters. Khalili dedicated his life searching for a method to fire mud houses and turn them to stone by firing and glazing an entire building after it is constructed from clay-earth on site. Khalili past away in 2008 but his institute Cal-Earth Institute remain bussy developing earth-buidling technuiqes for architects, builders and even high-tech clients such as Nasa (who is concidering to apply the in the construction of a moonstation.

Emergency-chic

There are a number of architects who design small emergency housing pavilions. Fashionable and with a great cause these solutions seem to be more about communicating the idea of reuse and adaptive housing rather than providing a working solution. One example is Cubo Arquitectos of Santiago who designed an emergency house mainly out of doors. Would it work in as an emergency solution for thousands of homeless people? Doubtful. But it does carry a story, and an interesting approach to emergency housing well worth investigating.