Urgent Architecture is a project based upon the needs and concerns of peoples and communities during post-disaster response and recovery.
This project engages in an open dialogue about how to rethink the definition and concept of urgent shelters, in a situation-specific way. It addresses issues of Post-Catastrophe Shelter, as well Shelters that could be considered Permanent, Mobile and Temporary Dwellings, which could provide a flexible habitat to the many people vulnerable to natural disasters around the world.

Post-catastrophe and Urgent Architecture can play a vital role in the Emergency phase of response to a disaster. It can allow the affected region and communities time to recover from devastation, before embarking upon the Replacement, Repair and Reconstruction phase.

Disasters happen everywhere, frequently and unpredictably. Urgent Architecture should not wait until the next disaster strikes to seek solutions to communities’ post-disaster shelter needs.

This project aims to transfer knowledge held by skilled architects and structural engineers—of low- and high-tech applications that can be adapted for mass production, in order to address post-disaster shelter needs—to the local artisans and builders, who can implement these practices in their communities. It also seeks to address the immediate need for practical shelter solutions for aid workers in the field.

Shelters should not be considered exclusively as material objects: it is profoundly important to understand how shelters are connected to human psychological needs for a place of dwelling. Shelters must also be considered with attention to humanitarian concerns. Planning, water, sanitation, ground and sky are key factors to consider when designing shelters, and they must be understood in their connection to the culture of that area; ideally, this results in making a shelter that “thinks for itself,” in integral ways analogous to how the human body functions.

These designs are not the final answers to how best to provide shelter in the wake of a natural disaster: this is designed to be an open, ongoing project. Urgent Architecture is intended to inspire new thinking and to raise new questions. How do people recover their lives, when everything that existed before is wiped out in an instant by a natural disaster? How can the sense of dwelling that is critical to human psychological well-being be reborn? What will be the qualities that constitute a flexible, responsive and well-integrated shelter?

Urgent Architecture. Agradece al Fondo Nacional para la cultura y las Artes FONCA . Otorgando la beca del programa Jóvenes Creadores 2009 2010 a Fernanda Vuilleumier. Para la elaboración de este proyecto.

Fernanda Vuilleumier Agradecer a la intervención del Arquitecto Julio Gaeta, México D.F. y al Arquitecto Gustavo Avilés, México D.F. por el soporte internamente del FONCA