Rensselaer Students Develop a Disaster Architecture from Water Bottles and Shipping Materials

2018-07-11T10:20:00-04:00

A preliminary hypothesis: we are living in an era marked by a profusion of “crises” — some environmental, some sociopolitical, some economic, and most a mixture of all three. In turn, in architecture, particularly its academies, we are witnessing an attendant explosion of designs for shelters that endeavor to alleviate or solve such crises. After all, architecture is a discipline that often imagines itself capable of “problem-solving,” with shelter design as the go-to solution. By and large, these undeniably well-intentioned endeavors fail to take-off for any number of reasons: practicality, scalability, affordability, etc. But — to offer a secondary hypothesis — this may be the wrong metric through which to interpret and judge such pedagogical exercises. Rather, these projects can be read as if texts, wherein the mutable and muted meanings of terms like “crisis” and “architecture” — and their relations with each other — emerge from the shadows cast by their ubiquity.

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Rensselaer Students Develop a Disaster Architecture from Water Bottles and Shipping Materials