Art Foundation Project 2016

My time at the Earthship Biotecture in Taos, heavily impacted on one of my Art Foundation projects. Within this project I wanted to consider how the Earthship principle could be applied to emergency shelter and humanitarian aid design.

I interviewed the head of water and sanitation at oxfam to ask questions about humanitarian shelter, to inform my design decisions and see what was appropriate to suggest.

I created a survey and asked people what they would consider most important if they had nothing. (the larger the writing the more common the answer was on the survey)

I wanted to outline why off-the grid is important for refugees and how their quality of life can be better when living off the grid.

Experimenting with a fishbone fold and it’s potential for use with emergency shelter.

Experimenting with fishbone folding with material. Starting to think about if the shelter could be made from canvas material.

I wanted to make a 1:1 model of a single person emergency shelter, and after looking at the work of Shigeru Ban and Issey Miake I wanted to use cardboard and folding techniques in my design.

Inital idea of an individual pod. This idea then evolved into creating modular units that could be assembled to create villages.

I created a plaster cast then used wax to create the model as I wanted the models to have a translucent quality to them so I could shine light through them when displaying them. I also wanted the wax to be melted down and reused after they had been displayed.

I decided to create hexagon structures as they could be easily placed together in different configurations and easily assembled.

This was my display piece where I considered how the houses would work in a humanitarian aid situation.

A proposal as to how the water harvesting system would work.

A proposal as to how the composting and food production would work.

A proposal as to how power would be obtained in the structures.

The display poster demonstrating the different aspects to the hexagon housing.