Slideshow: Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster
By Jenna Wortham
10.22.07 | 12:00 AM
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One of the biggest obstacles to emergency-shelter design is finding the right balance between providing a temporary shelter like a tent and working to rebuild permanent homes.
“You can’t design for disaster after the fact,” notes Kate Stohr, co-founder of the nonprofit humanitarian design firm Architecture for Humanity. “Unless it’s strategically thought about in advance of disaster, these ideas don’t work.” Often, what’s needed most is a central station where basic necessities — water, food, medical supplies and information — can be doled out. The trick is to design a transportable, sustainable structure that can support a sizable community and requires little maintenance.
Enter the Clean Hub, a self-sustained, portable machine built into a recycled shipping container. It rolls a power station and water-purification plant into one unit, making it ideal for deployment to any disaster-stricken area lacking basic facilities. Intended more as a base from which to distribute necessities rather than a residential unit, the Clean Hub can provide enough energy, water and sanitation for up to 150 people.
The Hub can be fabricated and shipped anywhere in the world in a few days — and once at its destination, takes less than an hour to erect. Design perks: a V-shaped roof collects rainwater, 16 solar panels generate electricity, and an underground reverse-osmosis filtration system recycles and stores water. When in use, the Hub produces enough compost to sustain a small vegetable garden. Designed by John Dwyer, founder of Shelter Architecture, a Minneapolis-based design studio, the first prototype was built in June 2007 and delivered to New Orleans, where it is currently in use as part of an urban agriculture project.
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If I was a survivalist and I had my retreat land, I’d be interested in this one since it could be folded up into something that could be locked up and concealed. And, it appears that you could site it without a lot of local help. imho.
There are twelve photos and stories. Each looks “interesting”. Some are easier than others. Looks like you could do “something” for under a thousand dollars. It wouldn’t be the Ritz, but “good enough”.
Certainly a better solution than putting a mobile home on the back of your hummer and pulling it through rioting indigenous sheeple as you good to your “plan b” fallback retreat location.
:-)
from behind the lines in
occupied socialist Nu Jerzee
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Reinke Faces Life 