SEISMOS

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Razvan Voda, Jaeho Park, Huizhong Li, Xiaonan Liu

For decades humanitarian architects have been stressing the importance of addressing post-disaster scenarios. However, often the responses were inappropriate shelters built only for a small part of the affected population. Architecture needs to move beyond its traditional role of designing inert buildings in places of relative certainty and to facilitate building processes that involve people in places of uncertainty and rapid, unexpected change. Among the different kinds of natural disasters affecting our life, the earthquake is the most unpredictable.

Nowadays, architectural responses to earthquakes and other critical situations are mainly based on the deployment of military tents and other highly inefficient shelters. In order to respond to the complex challenges of a disaster, we worked on the design of an autonomous housing system, which is completely automatic, rapidly deployable, real-time, adaptive and mobile. Using mobile robotic units that are globally distributed within the areas at the greatest risk for earthquakes, the system aims not only to house, but also to heal physically and psychologically the victims.

Real-time control systems like Kiva and AutoStore were thoroughly analysed to design a framework that is capable to efficiently respond to a post-disaster scenario. Earthquake-proof units transform, autonomously move, and aggregate in order to form housing clusters that adapt in real-time conditions and address people’s needs. Cellular Automata, Pathfinding Models and other computational strategies were used to rationalise the system that aims to be time-, space-, and energy-efficient. Digital and physical prototypes were designed and made during the process, targeting a minimal and compact structure that can move, transform, and aggregate with the minimum use of materials and energy. The resulting housing clusters are together forming an autonomous, mobile, and adaptive organism that can shelter, heal and frame an ecology where architecture and humans are intertwined.