Different approaches win competition for refugee housing

By Clifford A. Pearson

A woven shelter designed by Jiyoun Kim and a lightweight structure made of prefabricated modules by Gene Kaufman shared first place in the first annual Ideas Competition organized by the AIA’s Young Architects Forum and the Committee on Design. Eric Polite took third place with his design of a portable dwelling unit fabricated from recycled plastics and polymers. The competition challenged participants to devise a scheme for post-disaster housing on the site of Houston’s Astrodome.

Kim’s design uses donut-shaped fabric panels that unskilled workers on-site can fill with sand, mud, straw, or refuse and then weave together. Once filled and connected, the fabric panels serve as both skin and structure. 

Kim explains that her design was a response to a statement by a planner at the United Nation High Commission for Refugees who said it is very hard to replace time-tested tents, no matter their limitations. So instead of starting from scratch, she used tent fabric, but adapted it so it could create permanent, as well as temporary, housing. Kim worked on the project as her senior thesis at the New York Institute of Technology.

Kaufman designed a system of prefabricated modules that nest within each other for shipping, then slide out on-site. Pivoting solar panels and wind turbines on the roofs provide power, while rain is collected for drinking water, and dry composting toilets eliminate the need for sewage connection. As a result, the houses can operate even when a city’s power grid has collapsed.

Kaufman, who runs his own firm in New York City and has explored prefabricated plastic bathroom modules for hotel projects, says, “I’ve been working on all kinds of housing my entire career, so this competition was a chance to use that expertise for a good cause. You can say I’ve had this idea inside me for a long time.” He hopes to set up a nonprofit foundation that would produce the units, renting or selling some to pay for others deployed to disaster or refugee sites. 

Polite also used prefabrication in his scheme, devising a system of portable and stackable residences made from vacuformed units delivered to the site by truck.

Barton Phelps, FAIA, Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA, and Mehrdad Yazdani, AIA, served on the jury for the competition. 

 

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