Building Shelter

-Milda Miskinyte-

Whether or not we think that shelter is a commodity or a right, we leave most of it up to the real estate market to distribute. People with no available resources to buy homes end up occupying land illegally, mostly around a large metropolis, and building shelters for themselves out of the materials they have at hand – usually commercial or residential waste. Most of the shelters in the world’s ever-growing slums are built from recycled materials.

Here, a boy sits inside a house that he and 14 other slum children helped build out of 10,000 plastic soda bottles in 30 days time in the Piedade slum, north of Rio de Janeiro. Plastic waste is the scourge of many mega cities and proper recycling facilities are often missing. Often, there is no functioning recycling system. The bartender next door supervised the building of the house to give the children an educational activity and clean the Guanabara Bay of thousands of bottles.

Ideas like this are borrowed and applied in the Western world. Dan Phillips started Phoenix Commotion, a construction business in his hometown, Huntsville, Tex., where he builds low-income housing out of salvaged items. Here, the reclaimed wood front door window is composed of the bases of old wine bottles.

Cargo container homes are popular because they are very resistant to fire, commonplace in slums. Because it is cheaper for a shipping company to buy new containers than to transport empty ones back to the origin, a stockpile of containers is created in port areas.

It is interesting that these shipping containers also interest people who can afford conventional housing, but, learning from the innovative ways slum-dwellers use recycled material as housing, choose to live and work in these alternatives.

This award-winning office design by Clive Wilkinson is made out of stacked shipping containers is the home office of Palotta TeamWorks, a US charity event company. The 47,000 square foot warehouse is filled with shipping containers that have been transformed into modern office spaces. This design layout saved the company money on construction costs, and it allowed the entire space to be more open and airy.

Abandoned train cars have also become home to many. Perhaps the most bizarre train reuse is the Russian trend of converting old train cars into Orthodox Christian churches. They range from the simple repurposing to the elaborate redesign, complete with adding an entirely new facade.

However, the price of fully converting these types of otherwise wasted material into comfortable homes with proper insulation/ventilation is, by slum standards, too high, so there is a need for sustainable, recycled, cheap housing for people who live in slums. Plausible designs for this kind of housing already exist, some already standing. The following is affordable dwelling for slums of Nairobi made from recycled materials designed by Jennifer Margell. The roofs of these homes are made to collect and filter gray water and rainwater, and they can also be opened to let out heat. The recycled plastic walls are made hollow, where the spaces are later filled with mud to serve as insulation. The green houses also provide an option for a bathroom with a self-composting toilet. The water storage tank is placed behind the bathroom, and keeps the utilities in one central area.

Perhaps, the inhabitants of these two different worlds – the slum and the conventional city – can continue to exchange ideas and learn from each other in order to help each other to face and fix the problems that they are encountering together: increasing world population, depletion of natural resources, increasing number of natural disasters caused by global warming, etc.

Bibliography:

Allianz. Recycle and Build. http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/media/galleries/recycled_architecture.html

Ecofriend. Eco Homes: Affordable dwelling for slums of Nairobi made from recycled materials. http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/eco-homes-affordable-dwelling-for-slums-of-nairobi-made-from-recycled-materials/

Open Architecture Network. Creative Adaptable Shelter. http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects/5549

Web Urbanist. 10 Clever Architectural Creations Using Cargo Containers: Shipping Container Homes and Offices. http://weburbanist.com/2008/05/26/cargo-container-homes-and-offices/

Web Urbanist. How to Subvert Your House: Buying, Designing and Building Cargo Container Homes. http://weburbanist.com/2008/08/25/buying-designing-and-building-cargo-container-homes/

Web Urbanist. All Aboard! Clever Recycled Train Car Homes, Offices & Hotels. http://weburbanist.com/2009/10/29/all-aboard-clever-recycled-train-car-homes-offices-hotels/

Where. Squatting in America. http://thewhereblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/squatting-in-america.html