CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES FOR A FREE STREAMING SUBSCRIPTION OF HYLAND, a digital lifestyle magazine featuring residential decoration, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, cuisine, good works and reflections.
Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/353528
four feet wide, four feet high and ten feet long and weigh just ninety pounds. The cost? Just $3,000, as compared to a $25,000 to $40,000 FEMA trailer. The Flat Pack is the brainchild of University of Cincinnati associate professor Brian Davies and Stephen Slaughter, adjunct professor, both at UC's top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP), working with sixteen students in a fall semester seminar and seven independent study students in the spring. Says Davies, "We were inspired by Hurricane Sandy and decided to take on the challenge of creating a shelter that could be manufactured extremely quickly of…inexpensive materials that can be found at any home-improvement store." The professors and students deliberately designed the shelters to fit in a parking stall, "since car parks and surface lots provide flat foundations for quick set up," says Slaughter. The result is a viable, secure shelter or base for relief efforts for up to three months, suitable for a campsite with separate hygiene facilities (the Flat Pack does not include plumbing). I suggested in other HYLAND articles on the ICFF that the most salient design innovations shown were those to do with walls and wall coverings. The Flat Pack Shelter demonstrates powerfully the mutable character of the wall, its flexible adaptation to various human needs, from decoration to survival. One hopes that architects and consumers visiting the Flat Pack Shelter at the fair will be inspired to invest in further research and dissemination of such essential structures in the wake of natural catastrophe. H Lisa Zeiger HYLAND