Facing Emergencies: Design Strategies

Abstract

Some of nowadays problems have, due to general misunderstanding, been relegated out of our thoughts, as if they concerned us only remotely. One of these is the relationship between architecture – architectural design – and emergencies. But can the world of designers still find itself almost unprepared, as if taken by surprise, for a phenomenon that involves tens of millions of persons? Each year, due to earthquakes, war and emergencies of various kinds, temporary camps are set up all over the world, facilities which often turn out to be anything but temporary. Emergencies can no longer, in fact, be considered extraordinary, linked to uncommon, unforeseen and unpredictable events. Starting from these key considerations, the proposed essay – part of a research project on the subject of emergency housing conducted by professors of Architectural Composition at the DICEA, Faculty of Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome – will argue that, on the contrary, emergencies are very often predictable, manageable, and subject to planning aimed at reducing to a minimum the hardship of the people involved. Analyzing selected fast, economical, comfortable, repeatable but versatile, solid, and last but not least, urbanistically, architecturally and aesthetically valid proposals dealing with emergencies, the authors outline a strategy focused on considering emergency housing an experimental topic of architecture, highly oriented toward finding an indispensable synthesis between structural researches, technical issues and the configuration of space The essay deals with the subject of combining different materials – traditional (bamboo), innovative (teflon, polypropylene), recycled (containers) or usally considered inappropriate for construction (cardboard, pallets, rubble) – and modern prefabrication techniques, also digital, in order to propose a conception of systems for assembly, stiffening and eventually reach appropriate structural shapes.