Tag Archives: book

SEED

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SEED_Haiti is an environmental and humanitarian solution for providing relief housing with the adaptive reuse of surplus ISO shipping containers which in time turn into permanent homes. This solution uses the many shipping containers that are already in Haiti and the large number of shipping containers that are being sent to Haiti with relief supplies. In the coming months, there will be thousands of containers arriving to Haiti. SEED_Haiti is working on a strong incentive package to get this surplus of containers donated from the shipping industry for homes in Haiti rather than storing them or transporting them empty.

Key elements of the SEED_Haiti Design

Haiti’s hurricane season is approaching. The estimated 500,000+ of homeless need to be housed in stables structures quickly. The containers with their unibody construction of Cor-Ten steel, are not only hurricane and earthquake proof, they are also fire, mold, and vandalism proof. The design is able to seal back up in the case of another natural disaster protecting a family’s valuable possessions so that when they return home they are not starting from scratch again.

The SEED design transforms a 40’ shipping container into a home for 6-10 people with a minimum amount of effort. The container is cut with readily available equipment and utilizes low impact foundation technology to lift the home off the ground for ventilation and protect from flood. It is also covered with a secondary roof to keep the home cool. It is a low cost emergency solution. Incentives should be given to shipping companies to donate their surplus containers in Port-au-Prince and arriving containers with relief supplies.

The SEED home is equipped with 2 low cost pallet sized “pods” (water pod and energy pod) that meet the basic needs of access to drinking water, human sanitation and food preparation.

These elements are a micro infrastructure that provides self sufficiency a key element for place that has lost all infrastructure.

Possible questions of the SEED_Haiti Design

Is housing people in shipping containers appropriate?

Not only does it effectively protect the people that would otherwise be homeless or in tents, it protects them better than before. The container’s unibody structure is stronger than the homes which collapsed during the earthquake. As a dwelling type, container housing is already common as part of many countries vernacular and is being more commonly used in construction including luxury housing.

How do you transport such heavy structures?

The shipping container is the backbone of the global trade. Virtually every country in the world, including Haiti, has equipment for handling shipping containers. Transporting them from the port to a building site will be the same challenge for any emergency housing. In fact, other building materials and equipment will be delivered to Haiti in shipping containers.

Isn’t such a material (steel) in the Caribbean a bad choice in terms of heat gain?

The material will not overturn or collapse, but it will also not mold or burn. A canopy that is part of the design, provides not only shade and an additional space on the roof of the structure, but also a tunnel draft of air which insulates the roof. The emergency garden proposed for the roof also serves as insulation. The container’s simple cuts in the horizontal planes, provide natural cross ventilation.

For more information, visit http://10to10.org/.

bici_N

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Imagine a living map of a city that is created and recreated as the city regenerates minute by minute, a map that is drawn and redrawn by the daily activities of its inhabitants. Our proposal is to equip numerous bicycles in Barcelona’s new public transportation system Bicing with A/V (Audio/Video) and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices in order to collect the everyday qualitative and quantitative aspects of the city via the routine of its inhabitants. From these numerous individual fragments of the city, a collective story is assembled as users go about their lives to “compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” 1 Layer upon layer of stories build into a map constructed not by the authorities but by the everyday users of the system, from the ground up. The bicycle as an extension of the human body into the city becomes a full-scale mapping instrument, which captures both the sensual/experiential and the scientific/abstract notation of the human body into the city body and viceversa.

As the city occupant cycles through Barcelona, Borges conceit of a map at full scale in A Universal History of Infamy is realized not in dimension but in precision. 2 Cycling as the city cycles, the inhabitants write and read their stories on the streets, alleys, parks and sidewalks of their terrain vividly and precisely as they go about their daily routines. Described and narrated through the imagery of the scenery and conversations recorded on the A/V device and grounded with the details of the data inscribed by GPS, the city is revealed as “pictorial and sensual, intellectual and mathematical” 3 via daily routines and interactions. The hybrid A/V/GPS device will be housed within the bicycle’s light enclosure on the handlebar and powered by the pedaling of the cyclist. The device will stream a live feed of data that would be archived into a searchable database in which the collected time code (A/V) and (GPS) information are synchronized, blending the realism and sensuality of experience with the detailed discovery of the physiology of the cyclist as related to the geography and place it occupies. The data will exist online as a “living map” of anonymous yet detailed data of the life of a city and as an open source document for scientists and artists to analyze and interpret. What do calories burned, and body mass mean as related to length, speed, imagery and sound? What do latitude, longitude and topography mean as related to heart rate and mood? What do we understand by density of movement, interactions, delays, detours as experiences accumulated on a place? What is revealed about the sensual and the abstract and about the intimate relationship between the city and its occupants? And how do we benefit from visualizing this intricate ecology? *

1 de Certeau, Michel. Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday Life

2 Borges, Jorge Luis. A Universal History of Infamy

3 Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance

*A two-week study has already been conducted during 2008 in which five Barcelona residents volunteered to equip their respective Bicing bikes on each ride with A/V/GPS. From that the following documents were created and their potential is being explored. Next we will use this already collected data (70+ hrs of material) to figure out the logistics of the proposed “living map”.