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Designing an emergency shelter week 1 and 2
STILL STANDING (1) — resilience without permanence Reconceptualising Emergency Shelter: 12-week studio assignment · 4 phases · 3 weeks each MISSION: BETWEEN A TENT AND A HOME When disaster strikes, the humanitarian shelter response follows a predictable sequence: tents arrive first, then NGO-initiated dwellings constructed by traditional means. Both solutions have critical flaws — yet the gap between them remains unaddressed by design. Tents are fast and logistically viable, but they fail the people living in them. Poor thermal performance, rapid UV degradation, no acoustic or visual privacy, structural vulnerability to storms — the average design life is around six months, yet displaced people regularly inhabit them for years. They are designed for crisis, not for living. Traditionally built NGO dwellings address some of these failures, but introduce a critical one of their own: they become permanent. What is deployed as temporary becomes fixed in place — not by design, but by default. These settlements ossify into communities that were never planned as communities, lacking spatial logic, social infrastructure, services, and the dignity of intention. The field is thus defined by a persistent structural trade-off: deployability against habitability, and temporal control against social stability. This studio investigates whether a third typology is viable in the contested territory between tent and accidental township — a shelter system capable of crisis-speed deployment and cost-efficiency, while satisfying standards of structural integrity, thermal and spatial adequacy, site integration, and genuine reversibility. This studio asks for a single buildable prototype that complies with the social, functional, and environmental constraints that you have distilled for this gap in emergency response.
