Precast lightness, cardboard architecture responds to emergency - design, prototyping and testing of a high performance emergency house-kit

Abstract

Housing emergency is a central problem to which all communities must give rapid and reliable answers. Recent scene is characterized by an increasing of social pressure and dramatic changes in human conditions, resulting from economic crisis, wars, and climate changes. As a drastic result, we are witnessing the explosion of effects of natural disaster, such as floods, earthquake, tsunami, in terms of lost life, evacuees and refugees. The aim of this research is the implementation of a comfortable housing module that could be assembled by victims themselves in much time then a tent but in much less time than a standard emergency inhabiting solution. A temporary emergency housing module is the results of a holistic approach, that combines form and function studies, materials and technologies, territory and climate to match the traditional design issues, such as comfort, safety and quality of living conditions, with the particular issues of an emergency application such as transportability, quickness, facility and repeatability. The key instruments used to drive the research are: comparative analysis of the state of the art, manuals provided by the civil protection bodies, and parametric bioclimatic strategies. The comparative evaluation of the common Italian civil protection solutions has defined the boundaries of the emergency design, pointing out the necessity of a new proposal of emergency housing modules that can be assembled and disassembled, halfway between the tents and the common housing solutions. The parametric design has allowed to characterize some design variables in order to make the building model repeatable in several climatic conditions. The executive design, produced by addressing a search for innovative solutions on the market, is the final design phase. The research process continues with the production moment. The goal in building a full-scale prototype is the validation of theoretical hypothesis: it is possible to build an emergency house-kit made of corrugated cardboard. The conclusion of the research is the testing moment. The idea is to compare the results of on-site measurements with the outcomes of the simulation phase at the same climate conditions. The results of the measurements are coherent with the expected results produced by the simulations.