Building Blocks for Better Communities - Studio Final Project

Shelter/Bus II - The final studio project was to design an inventive and thoughtful shelter | bus to meet the needs of the following four hurricane relief workers in
Eastern North Carolina:
• Lynn : a visually-impaired teacher, plays guitar, conservative Jew
• Chris : an African American nurse, training for a marathon, works 3rd shift
• Siu : a language teacher, Montagnard, broke leg recently and on crutches
• Chi Chi : a nurse from New Mexico, has a pet bird, Hispanic

With this came Building Blocks for Better Communities.
Concept: Building Blocks are a collection of basic shapes that stimulate the imagination of children. The idea of a manipulable environment lets children do what they do best: construct their own world, break it down and rebuild it. Building Blocks for Better Communities provides a bottom up approach to disaster relief, while maintaining the functional and entertaining aspects of simple building blocks. Transformation, material and color are linked to explain spaces and movement.



FloorplanCross Section 1 / Cross Section 2
Interior Playground Detail
Interior Playground Detail
Interior 2nd Floor Lounge Perspective
Section in Perspective
Site Transformation: the unit is site dependent, on a narrow site the unit is stacked vertically, on a wider site, the top and bottom portions can be detached and placed adjacently

Room/Box Transformation: rooms slide out of mainframe on a track system to create more interior space

Roof Transformation: Roof panels expand up to increase interior ceiling height


Furniture Transformation: movement of furniture and appliances reflects building blocks in that it can telescope, nest or stack