way our approach meets the needs of a new kind of refugee, the Internally Displaced Person. The UN recently recognized the existence of 25 million IDP worldwide whom they want to help restore to their homes. Doctors Without Borders goes one step further in their definition of refugee; to include people internally displaced within functioning society, in other words, the homeless. For example. they send their disaster relief teams into the slums of Rio. In our practice, we too operate with this understanding of the continuum of homelessness. Around a year after the competition, the housing organization Commonground asked us and our partner on the project Marguerite McGoldrick to design a new flop-house, meaning de-mountable rooms that stand within a larger-loft space as an alternative to the sea-of- beds shelter. In its pre-fabricated component system and spatial flexibility this housing is a lot like our proposal for disaster relief. In this case, a knock down aluminum frame is bolted to plywood panels with a simple wrench — almost like a really big Ikea cabinet. Relief organizations resist the sea of beds and therefore under- utilize the safe havens of armories, factories, schools and gyms because they haven’t considered alternatives like our design for Commonground. We envision that Extreme Housing will allow for the armory as well as the camp, the city as well as the muddy field as sites of relocation. Extreme housing will meet the physical and economic criteria of disaster but also reconstitute the qualities of privacy, self-determination, comfort and beauty that everyone calls home.
A full scale model of one room, exterior.
The interior of the room above.
The basic unit above, and to the right, two units showing how they can colonize safe haven space.
Deborah Gans and Matthew Jalisek have a practice in New York City.
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ON SITE review 5
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