ABSTRACT
In the course of designing disaster-relief housing for the “What if New York City …”1 international design competition, we were interested in the possibilities oered by lightweight, homogeneous material assemblies for building prefabricated housing. e benet of material “lightness” was in direct response to the special transportation and assembly needs of disaster relief housing. Such construction allows for expediency in deployment as well as lowered cost in transportation and erection. Our proposal illustrated a systematic consideration of these aordances and sought examples outside of architecture such as the transportation, textile, and marine industries to explore potential manufacturing processes and delivery methods for panelized textile composites. As sponsors of the competition, the New York City Oce of Emergency Management (OEM) recognized that dense urban neighborhoods would face severe consequences from catastrophic storms and they sought “innovative ideas for providing provisional housing” for displaced residents.2 More signicantly, the OEM called for designs that would oer alternatives to the typical FEMA trailer and establish a “new paradigm”3 that would allow residents to quickly return to their neighborhoods and be active participants in the recovery eort. Our entry, reading Water (Figure 9.1), proposed ways in which disaster-relief housing could play a role in remediating the Hudson and East River estuarine ecosystems while also providing disaster victims with safe, proximate inhabitation that created communal identity and provided a positive understanding of living within an ecologically sensitive architecture. e scheme deployed the housing along pier-like infrastructural “threads” that extended from the shoreline. Pre-assembled housing would be delivered on barges and attached to the threads to form patches of dense urban communities. e “threads” themselves provided remediation services, including water ltration, which revitalized the shoreline ecology. e challenge for the housing would be its inhabitation and environmental performance over this period of remediation. How well could a ber composite building system, designed for easy deployment, respond to the shiing needs of human comfort? How adaptable was it to radical environmental shis like temperature? Could it be adaptable for other climates and hence become a universal disaster housing prototype? Could the choice of ber composites and the technical constraints of disaster relief housing provide some basis for formal and aesthetic experimentation?
