“Houses built from accommodation cabins to provide post-disaster transitional shelter” is part of a larger project within the line “Modular Architecture” developed by the Research Group “Design and Industrial Production”, belonging to the Technical University of Madrid, Spain.
In the industrialised countries affected by disasters, there was a massive demand of temporary housing, where rapid reconstruction cannot occur. Reasons for this included: high expectations of governmental aid, climatic risk, an active private building sector and expectations of very slow reconstruction.
The project aims to respond to the need for adequate temporary housing, available in time at an affordable price, as part of the national disaster housing strategy based on the principle of shelter provision as a process, using in-country off-site fabrication systems as a community economic resource.
Rather than focusing on the invention of specific products, the proposed houses are built from the combination of industrially made accommodation cabins, implemented with prefabricated subsystems and other catalogue components available on the market, all they set together by dry joints, so they can change through time improving living conditions.
The cabins are ISO standard prefabricated modules, available off-the-shelf, with self-sustaining light steel structure and sandwich panel insulation, designed for assemble and disassemble as sectional units that can be transported and stacked easily, both horizontally as well as vertically, like boxes. Then the system can be relocated, upgraded, and/or re-used during its long life span and finally dismantled and recycled.