BY: CONNOR BRIAN
Extreme challenges await for environmental migrants as a direct result of climate change. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 the earth will have to come face to face with 200 million environmental refugees. Families will lose their farmland and subsistence. For them, movement will become a fundamental part of being human as they attempt to resettle in unfamiliar lands, carrying only the amenities from home which they can fit in their two hands.
To provide a solution for this increasingly relevant problem of the not too distant future, award winning designer Abeer Seikaly bases her design on temporary huts of nomadic tribes.
The lightweight, portable, and flexible shelters for disaster zones are made of a structural woven fabric that can adapt to hot and cold climates. The shelters’ double-layered skin is hollow which allows cross ventilation, while also being able to seal up and huddle down during rainy months and frigid winters.
She finds inspiration for her snake-skin like design on traditional basket weaving techniques, which allow the design to be scaleable by “Blurring the distinction between structure and fabric.”
The outer fabric has strong thermal properties that can absorb solar radiation to convert into useable electricity, while the inner skin provides countless pockets to store items that make it feel like home.
Each tent has its own water collection system that rises to a storage tank on the top of a tent through a thermosiphoning system that runs off the solar energy that the outer skin absorbs. This allows the fundamental luxury of taking quick warm showers.
The tent finds contact “between exploration and settlement” and could “potentially close the gap between need and desire as people metaphorically weave their lives back together, physically weaving their built environment into a place both new and familiar, transient and rooted, private and connected,” says Seikaly.
In this space refugees find “pause from their turbulent worlds, a place to weave the tapestry of their new lives. They weave their shelter into home.”
Sources: abeerseikaly.com
