Natural disasters can be unpredictable and devastating, but some inventive emergency-shelter designs are proving that resourcefulness can triumph over seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, can devastate a community, but skilled architects and design engineers are working hard to confront the challenges of disaster planning. Designing emergency shelters can be particularly tricky, as they must meet a range of intersecting requirements, including quick assembly and disassembly, cost-efficient materials, suitability for human habitation and resistance to environmental conditions.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 2008 Disaster Housing Plan, “[f]inding and providing the actual structures to house displaced disaster victims during this interim housing period is the most tangible challenge that emergency management officials, at all levels of government, face.”

Due to these challenges, the third step in the FEMA plan is to “[e]mploy innovative forms of interim housing,” which is where creative engineering and design step in.

Late last year, Wired magazine listed some of the most innovative interim housing designs to emerge in recent years. Here, we revisit a few of the more memorable entries along with a couple of our own.

The Paper Schoolhouse
The May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, caused a massive amount of destruction in the region. The rebuilding effort is a time-consuming process, but many students have been able to resume their education thanks to an emergency schoolhouse design that relies on cardboard tubing to form temporary structures.

In a collaborative venture between Keoi University, Japan’s Banlab and architect Shigeru Ban, a construction team designed and built three schoolhouses each with a floor plan of approximately twenty feet by a hundred feet. The buildings are made of hundreds of thick paper tubes with plywood joints, plywood roofs and polycarbonate insulation.

A paper structure offers several advantages. “It is cheap, and more importantly, it uses materials that are available anywhere in the world. It is also structurally sound, so you do not have to worry about safety issues,” the schoolhouse project director recently told PingMag.

(For information on houses built to withstand earthquakes, see IMT’s earlier Built to Last … and Dance and Heal and Think.)

The Collapsible Home
In many cases, it’s impractical or impossible to build an emergency house in a disaster area, so relief efforts must resort to shipping in temporary shelters for the displaced. But the price of transportation can also be a major problem.

“Shipping costs are prohibitive — it can sometimes cost twice as much to ship a design as it does to build it,” a spokesperson for Architecture for Humanity told Wired.

To address this concern, Vestal Design has developed the SHRIMP housing unit, a four-person shelter that can fold up into a quarter of its full size. This enables several units to be transported in a single shipping container and could, in theory, deliver housing for up to 100,000 people on one large cargo ship. Using compressed air canisters and inflatable pontoons, each SHRIMP shelter can be set up in just a few minutes.

Inflatable Houses
While units like the SHRIMP can be put together quickly, ease of assembly is another important criterion for interim housing. Construction expertise or unloading time may be in short supply during an emergency situation, so a shelter that can be deployed with minimal skill requirements is a major benefit.

The engineers at Concrete Canvas have developed a cement-reinforced fabric that is bonded to a plastic lining and can be stuffed into a compact bag. Simply add water to the bag, unfold it and a special gas pack will inflate the structure. The result is a thin, lightweight concrete shelter with earthquake resistance and temperature shielding.

Its main advantage is that it can be deployed by only two people and requires no training to assemble. The setup takes under an hour and the shelter automatically inflates itself in less than a day.

Concrete Canvas shelters are intended to last for up to a year, but the Life Cube designed by Inflatable World provides a more short-term alternative. Stored inside a four-foot cube, this unit can inflate into a twelve-foot tall, vinyl-walled building. It comes pre-packed with emergency supplies, but is only meant for the first seventy-two hours following a disaster.

The Puzzle-Piece Shed
In situations where supplies are lacking, interim housing that requires nails or other equipment in its construction may not be a feasible solution. California-based architect Gregg Fleishman has created a new emergency structure that may solve this problem.

The DH1 module is an emergency shed constructed from numerous pieces of European birch plywood coated with a phenolic resin finish to render them waterproof. The pieces have integral slots and notches, allowing them to be snapped into place without relying on any fasteners or tools.

Each piece can be transported by hand, and the completed structure sits roughly thirty inches off the ground to protect it from low flooding and water damage.

(For more examples of innovative flood-proofing, see IMT’s earlier Houses for Sail.)

The Survival Dome
Perhaps the most significant attribute for a reliable emergency shelter is its ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions while shielding its inhabitants from the brunt of the effects. The InterShelter dome provides some of the sturdiest protection available.

Composed of fiberglass composite panels, the dome doesn’t require an internal frame and can be built by two people using only a screwdriver and a ladder. With a base diameter of twenty feet, a standard model can fit five people. The dome can remain intact under powerful hurricanes and earthquakes up to 8.5 on the Richter scale. In addition, a durable gel coating on the building’s exterior provides resistance to snow, rain and extreme temperatures.

The creative engineering that goes into producing this dome and other innovative emergency housing shows that resourceful design work can react to nearly any challenge, whether from the skies above or the earth below.

Earlier

Devastating China Quake’s Economic Ripple Effect

Built to Last … and Dance and Heal and Think

Houses for Sail

Resources

2008 Disaster Housing Plan
FEMA, June 10, 2008

Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster
by Jenna Wortham
Wired, Oct. 22, 2007

Instant Architecture for China’s Earthquake Victims
by Ayana
PingMag, Nov. 14, 2008

Keoi University

Banlab

Shigeru Ban Architects

Vestal Design

Concrete Canvas

Inflatable World

Gregg Fleishman

Shelter Systems
Gregg Fleishman Studios, 2008

InterShelter, Inc.