Pallet-House: Modular Refugee Housing
by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK on 06. 6.06
Emergency shelters should always be an important and prescient subject for designers. However the need for efficient shelters to help house displaced people seems more urgent than ever after the series of natural disasters over the last year and very recently again in Java. The work being taken on by groups such as Architecture For Humanity and Habitat For Humanity is on an unimaginable scale and they need all the help they can get. Various design solutions have been put forward time and again over the years, some with more success than others. Today we learnt of a proposal by I-Beam Design called The Pallet-House, which uses wooden shipping pallet as a modular construction material.
New York based designers Azin Valy and Suzan Wines originally developed the concept as transitional housing for the returning refugees of Kosovo. ‘The competition guidelines defined transitional housing as that which bridges the gap between temporary tent shelter and permanent home. They stipulated that the house last about five years, the time it takes a Kosovar family to rebuild a typical stone house.’
There are various important and clever features about this proposal. Not only is the material chosen cheap, about $5 each, but pallets are already used to transport other emergency supplies such as clothing, food and medical supplies. This means the palettes will have a second life after performing their primary function. Secondly the Pallet-House is modular therefore allowing for variation in structure, meaning that not all the shelters will look the same. This is an important feature, since many proposals for emergency housing fail because of people’s resistance to homogenised housing; they would prefer to build their own.
The Pallet-House while quick and easy to build also allows for a gradual evolution from emergency shelter to permanent housing, ‘with the addition of more stable indigenous materials like rubble, stone, earth, mud, plaster and concrete.’ This is also adaptable to the cultural context and personal tastes. As I-Beam say, ‘The size and layout of each home can evolve over time encouraging the reconstruction of family and village clusters to develop naturally as they have for centuries throughout Southern Europe. The Pallet-House adapts easily to almost every climate on Earth.’ On their website you can see I-Beam’s original prototype for Kosovo, a prototype for Sri Lanka and a Palette House workshop With Ball State University in Indiana. Let’s hope that these Pallet-Houses don’t remain in prototype form and that what looks like a great concept does actually function in reality. via: o2 Group :: I-Beam Design
Very neat, never though of using pallets for prefab housing.
Saw two guys in Maidstone, Kent, UK who have outfitted their entire house with furniture, kitchen cabinets etc. made out of pallets that were partially broken.
This is very similar to a project in Costa Rica that used bamboo split pieces on wood panels in Costa Rica that created a couple thousand homes. The panels were created in a factory and then shipped to a site then covered with cement on site. it was called Funbambu for Bamboo Foundation
Big deal. 30 years ago in Seattle we used to go down to the docks and load up on pallets, which they were throwing away. We built a porch and a spare room onto one house with them, lots of furniture and heated our houses with them. I heated with wood for three years, breaking up pallets for my firewood.
I was homeless out there at the street level for 14 of the 25 years i was an addict, living on the side of the freeway in a pallet house, cardboard boxes, abandoned gas stations or looking for a warm bush to crawl under. I certainly didn't care if I lived another day or not. is a matter of fact.....I wished more than anything that I was dead because at least that would stop me from the suffering I was experiencing on a dialy basis. I got my clothes and food out of dumpsters, I cleaned myself in restaurant bathroom or under garden hoses. I couldn't tust anyone around me at that level because they would cut my throat for a crack pipe. the cops would play us all agianst eachother, take our money, give us our dope back and tell us we were paid up for the month, to have a nice day and call it street justice. the shelters would not let you in unless you stayed overnight and I could not go all night without a fix. I could not go to a meal line unless I had alrady had my fix because I could not eat without it. Every single function in life depended on my drug of choice.
That's an interesting comment because I thought the same thing. A couple of years ago one of our sons looked into technological breakthroughs in the housing industy with the idea of doing some development. That's why I'm familiar with the difference between modular housing, which is constructed according to state industrial and local building codes and manufactured housing which is regulated by federal codes.
The Pallet House is an inexpensive, efficient and easily realizable solution to the problem of housing people displaced by natural disaster, plague, famine, political and economic strife or war. This proposal was included in the 2000 Architecture Biennale in Venice as an example of "ethical" architecture and won an Honorable Mention in an international competition to design transitional housing for the returning refugees of Kosovo. The competition guidelines indicated that it takes about five years for a Kosovar family to rebuild a typical stone house. The Pallet House solution is transitional in that it is able to evolve from temporary shelter to permanent home through the addition of more permanent materials over time.
good ide to build shelters from pallet. may be just a few man can think about it. but in some country like Indonesia my country, pallets are not easy to look for. because Indonesia or 3th countrys not industry countrys, that did'nt have many pallet..
in Java Indonesia, need 100.000 houses. so how to get many pallets to build 100.000 houses?
I won for 1st place competition for earthquake victims, sponsor by CHF International (NGO) december 2006. http://www.chfindonesia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=113&Itemid=26
I use coconut wood for the construction that more easy to get in Java and cheap. my structure design can use bamboo too! so they can choose 1 from 2 materials that more easy to get..
I think, every design must look from the basic of local material. finaly architect must use local tradition experience of build in the area of disaster.
good ide to build shelters from pallet. may be just a few man can think about it. but in some country like Indonesia my country, pallets are not easy to look for. because Indonesia or 3th countrys not industry countrys, that did'nt have many pallet..
in Java Indonesia, need 100.000 houses. so how to get many pallets to build 100.000 houses?
I won for 1st place competition for earthquake victims, sponsor by CHF International (NGO) december 2006. http://www.chfindonesia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=113&Itemid=26
I use coconut wood for the construction that more easy to get in Java and cheap. my structure design can use bamboo too! so they can choose 1 from 2 materials that more easy to get..
I think, every design must look from the basic of local material. finaly architect must use local tradition experience of build in the area of disaster.
I would have thought that a combined structure for a refugee house would have included a shipping container for all the essential service utility functions, surrounded by the pallet structure (reinforced & braced using slotted angle, as in industrial shelving & workbench frame construction). You could easily pre-store a few sheets of plyboard sheeting from renewable forest production for weather proofing most of the exterior pallet framed walls, inside the shipping container. In fact, it could prove a VERY useful project to design a shipping container disaster house which utilises ALL three constructive concepts & materials mentioned here.
You could include all essential post disaster recovery hardware for a family inside (basic solid fuel cooking stoves, cooking utensils, water supply components including purification, sleeping blankets, candles for lighting, etc.), but also include a few basic tools for the family to self-build the pallet structure & using the slotted angle to ensure structural security and allow any external utility supplies to be secured to it.
I am open to sensible discussion over this with a variety of professional background experience & contingency preparedness planning (voluntary) work to draw from.
John Locke