Andrea Chiabrera | Attilio Delucchi Baroni - YTAA Shortlist

An Architectural Approach to Humanitarian Crisis

"BAGWall is a technology designed to assemble shelters for refugees in a quick and simple way, using cheap and locally recycled materials to improve tent’s efficiency and performances keeping the cost contained. Many components designed for different situations allow the shelter to be flexible and adaptable to various natural and social contexts."

Refugee camps are a unique reality; size, population and infrastructural system make them comparable to small cities but they lack completely of those places that define an urban center as the scene of social life.

We took the graduation project as a unique possibility to focus on a real and tangible problem, away from the fancy facades, extravagant shapes and complex solutions that characterize contemporary architecture.

A topic that could have a social meaning and importance, that could help people to make their lives better by working to mitigate the effects of the many emergencies that afflict the world nowadays.

Therefore, we decided to turn our attention to the refugee situation, an issue that has reached unprecedented size involving most countries and shaping tomorrow’s geopolitical condition.

A situation that even if involves millions of people, entire cities and communities worldwide has not yet been approached from an architectural points of view.

Dozens of handbooks and technical guides on how-to-organize and build a refugee camp are available on-line but none of those treat the dwelling, its maintenance and evolution over time in a comprehensive way.

Refugee camps, built to answer to an emergency, often became permanent place of life,with thousands of people living for years in tents designed to last few months.

It is undeniable that in these types of situations the primary aspects are others, but we think that depriving entire families of the place of domestic life can have, over a long time span, serious effects on a community erasing its cultural identity and traditions.

To design a shelter that can improve tent’s performances and efficiency by replacing it after the first emergency phase and that can give an adaptable base on which build a dwelling appropriate to climatic and cultural context as well as to local resource availability has been the main goal of this project.

The concept of home is defined and elaborated in different ways from culture to culture but some aspects, such as its personalization and improvement remain constant in all realities.

Giving a solid base, a starting point to this spontaneous and unstoppable process by mixing traditional wisdom and technical knowledge is the best way to control the results raising the living standards and preserving communities’ growth.