The Architecture of Temporary Housing

The need for temporary housing has arisen in recent years for various reasons. For one, there have been more natural disasters in the world, and/or other situations that require finding temporary housing for large numbers of people very quickly. There are also creations such as described in the article, How Burning Man is Built, a temporary city that evolves in the desert from scratch for a massive festival, attracting people from all over the globe. Each year, a team of 21 surveyors spend seven days laying the lines and waypoints of a 5.62-mile plan, creating the largest and most iconic art installation at Burning Man – the city itself.

It is an art installation, but it is also a sign of our times. A way to assemble people in a new way.

“Most cities they grow gradually. We have the advantage of being able to enact an entire city plan and make it consistent. A lot of cities that you would be more familiar with have developed slowly over time, so they don’t make a whole lot of sense. This city is planned to be temporary so we can make it a lot more organized than a regular city.”
–Professor Plague, Surveyor for Burning Man

70,000 people come from everywhere, they come and built shelters in the most sustainable way.

With another vision entirely, Pritzker Prize-winner Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has joined the disaster relief effort in Okayama Prefecture, Japan, and has set up his Paper Partition System for evacuees of one of the most devastating floods that has occurred in the country in over 30 years. Up to 30 percent of the Mabicho district was underwater, and more than 155 people died across the entire region.

Paper Partition System, Voluntary Architects Network

As part of the effort, Ban joined the team from the Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN) (a non-profit organization he also founded) to construct a set of paper and fabric dividers inside school gymnasiums where survivors of the torrential rain are sheltered.

Housing is one of our foremost needs as human beings. Ban believes that as architects, it is “our mission to make living environments better.”

People struggling to survive in disaster recovery environments are grateful for this viewpoint. The cardboard panels and fabric of the Paper Partition System can be made into individual areas that can be curtained off for privacy. All materials are recyclable.

Voluntary Architects Network

The school gymnasiums across the Mabicho district have been turned into a temporary housing refuge for evacuees displaced by the rain that pummeled western Japan.

This is not the first time Ban has involved himself in disaster relief housing. In 2016, Ban made the trip to Ecuador to lend his assistance in the rebuilding work after a deadly earthquake, offering architectural training in the affected area. The year before he designed with wood, rubble and straw some modular shelters for those left homeless in the wake of two devastating earthquakes in Nepal.

He also built a church out of cardboard and stained glass panels in 2013, after an earthquake destroyed a cathedral in Christchurch. Shipping containers became temporary homes in Japan after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed homes in 2013.

Voluntary Architects’ Network

In 2014, Ban was awarded the Prtizker Prize for recognition of his work using low cost materials for disaster relief architecture.

Madworkshop Foundation’s Homeless Studio offers help to homeless in the city of Los Angeles, where there are about 50,000 homeless in residence. A number that has increased 5.7% since 2015, at least part of the homeless population is now the recipient of the Homeless Studio’s Homes For Hope project prototype for a single-person, portable housing unit that offers a person in need with a safe home. The Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission is the beneficiary, an organization that aims to provide women over the age of 55 with a place to live.

The entire development is expected to cost less than $1 million, and each unit is estimated at $25,000 for labor and materials. Funding for the project is being raised by the Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission.

The idea for temporary, relocatable and affordable housing has morphed into a structure that is suspended 2 feet above the ground, and is modular. The units will each be 92 square feet and large enough to house a bed, desk, shelves and chair. The modular design makes it possible to create a 30-bed community that has some communal spaces such as dining hall, bathrooms, etc. The beauty of the housing is that it can be assembled in two weeks and relocated on the back of an 18-wheeler.

According to Los Angeles building and zoning codes, the project homes are manufactured somewhere else and assembled onsite, so they come under the category of congregant housing. This means that they can be constructed on any residential or commercial plot of land.

The Homeless Studio was founded by the Madworkshop Foundation to support the innovative social designs for the next generation of architects. Spearheaded by USC faculty members Sofia Borges and R. Scott Mitchell, the studio is comprised of 11 fourth-year architecture students from the University of Southern California, for whom the design is a collaborative final project for the student’s architecture course requirements. Madworkshop provided the funding the resources needed to create the prototype.

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