Project Overview

Emotional Shelter is a collaboration between two small community-orientated architecture practices Here Studio and Visionary Design Development and several architectural graduates. The structure, in the form of a cat, and constructed from bamboo and corrugated iron, is a prototype for community-built shelter – shelters that connect and comfort people emotionally. The shelter was built off-site in Kensington by roughly sixty team members and other volunteers, requiring over 800 hours of collective labour from March to May 2013.

Organisation

Emergency Shelter Australia

Team

Michelle Emma James + Ammon Beyerle (Here Studio)
Mary Ann Jackson, Nick Shearman, Kamil Muhammad (VDD)

Soledad Maldonado, Katherine Sampson, Nicole Mechkaroff, Marjan Sangari

Shaina Saporta (ARUP)
Munir Vahanvati + Mittul Vahanvati (Giant Grass Design)
Paul Szymkowiak & Luke Weston (lighting)
Natalie Erika James (film)

Special Thanks:

Tony Rapazzo
TDR Property Services

Australian Ropes Course Builders
Robbie Spencer
Sammy Richards

Ralph Green

Volunteers:

Carlee Suen
Gonzalo Valiente
Pete Spence
Eleanor Chapman
Charlotte Blythe
Ian Foreman
Jim Commadeur
Meredith Dufour
Adrian Beyerle
Tony Cartwright
Damien Melotte
Lyle Talbot
Toni Green
Laura Claassen
Karla Orwin
Becks
Tom McLean
Salome Romero
Alice Ha
Glenda Yiu
Alina Dain
David Sun
Jessie Chow
Natalie Chow
Louise Castle
Katie Petros
Yukari Yamaguchi
Timothy Li
Robert McDougall
Kyla Sabrina
Jina He
Sockkee Ooi
Leonor Gausachs
Rifat Muharram
Jersey Tang
Sara Chan
Raisa Kabir
Bronwyn Geddes

Project Brief

Emotional Shelter was first built to be part of Emergency Shelter Exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne. For the concept design we submitted, we depicted several scenarios in which the shelter could be built and used, as well as various incarnations it could take within a community, throughout the lifecycle of a disaster. As architects, it was important to us that the shelter would have a lifespan beyond the four-day exhibition, and so the ‘cat’ (as it is now lovingly called) was donated to The Venny Adventure Playground in Kensington.

Project Need

The creative direction of the project came from our interest in the power of play, and how the wisdom of children can bring hope and imagination to difficult situations. Children can teach us a lot about making-do and remembering to have fun even when it's tough. Deviating from the exhibition brief of a shelter for a single family, we created a multipurpose shelter that could be designed and built by a local community using salvaged materials as a dedicated space for their own children and themselves.

Design Challenge

Our research indicated that architect-designed shelters are not commonly utilised by disaster relief NGOs for the intended purpose of emergency shelter. We therefore questioned the wisdom of proposing yet another redundant solution. Re-examining the brief, we reinterpreted it to provide a shelter to serve at a community level rather than at an individual level, providing the opportunity for community shelter to play a part in healing post-disaster.

We designed a form that encourages interaction and encourages spontaneous events to happen by providing a shelter which is more than an exhibition thing to look at. We achieved this by creating a sheltered space (body of the cat), a space that embraces (arms of the cat), and iconic form (the cat).

We learned a lot about the use of bamboo (i.e. hours of splitting, cutting, and lashing with rope!) through our collaboration with Giant Grass Design and achieved a design which balances natural and salvaged industrial materials.

Sustainability

Using the process of building as a way of engaging people in participating in creating their own shelter underpins the design. Inexpensive materials salvaged for free or at minimal cost were used: the base is salvaged timber pallets, hand-lashed bamboo arches form the structure creating the body, and salvaged corrugated iron clads the exterior.

In addition to providing a finished structure, we hosted a series of free events over the weekend of the Emergency Shelter Exhibition, giving the wider community opportunities to engage with the Cat. Pop –up yoga, Laughing classes, film nights and impromptu meetings were held in the space. “I’ll meet you at the Cat” became a tag line over the weekend!

Essential to the long-term sustainability of the Emotional Shelter was finding a home for it after the exhibition. The Cat has been moved to the Venny, a communal backyard and play space for children from the Kensington public housing estate and surrounding areas. We were moved to find so many synergies between our process and theirs by chance – The Venny uses play as an intervention and prevention tool for children who have experienced trauma.