ONARCHITECTURE- Helter shelter: Arch students make $10 homes
|
Recently, about a dozen UVA students found themselves sleeping out in their professor's back yard in temporary shelters made out of cans and cardboard. A clever new UVA housing option ? A punishment for violating the Honor Code?
Actually, it was a legitimate design-build contest, which had UVA architecture, engineering, and environmental science students building five temporary shelters out of recycled and reclaimed materials in preparation for ecoMOD4, the award-winning design series that aims to prove that prefabricated houses can be attractive, well-built, enviromentally friendly, and affordable. Indeed, talk about affordable housing-- students were only allowed to spend $10 on their shelter, had to put it up in less than two hours, and the entire structure had to be broken down and recycled the next day.
"It was a way to build teamwork and get our hands dirty as we start ecoMOD4," says architecture Professor John Quale, director of the ecoMod projects, who offered up his back yard to the designing vagabonds. Quale describes one shelter made entirely of newspapers and aluminum cans cut up to make a roofing material, others that used bamboo or reclaimed plastic bags and sheathing ironed together to make an exterior skin, and one that was a geodesic dome made out of reclaimed cardboard from boxes.
|
|
Friday 26 September, 2008 09:24 AM |
Save This Page