Radical Gravity

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Angelina Kozhevnikova, Konuralp Senol, Kyungha Kwon, Ghida Khayat

A Global System that provides Airdrop Shelters after Natural Disasters.

Natural disasters are an urgent problem on a global scale. Their number is increasing due to varied reasons – most prominently climate change – leaving millions of people without a home. Radical Gravity attempts to design an efficient global system of a fast and strategic response that accommodates these people in shelters, while creating environment-friendly and sustainable shelter settlements with respect to human well-being.

Following natural disasters, land infrastructure is often compromised. We therefore propose using the high-altitude airdrop method for emergency shelters deployment. Instead of limiting the stage air dropping to the delivery of standard shelters, we consider this as a self-building or self-construction stage that distributes ready-to-use emergency shelter settlements to the ones affected.

The research searches for more passive strategies of control, such as manoeuvring the flight using air resistance through changes in the drag distribution during the aggregation level. The aggregation flight results in new architectural morphologies that differ depending on environmental and site-specific parameters.

These shelter settlements consist of inflated units that are self-sustainable and adaptive to population needs. Using passive strategies of harvesting water, managing energy transitions, and controlling the microclimate, the project aims for a circular model of operation and intelligent ecological thinking.