Rounding Out Shelter Design

October 27, 2009

Recently the winner of a shelter design contest organized by the Guggenheim Museum and Google's 3-D modeling arm SketchUp was announced--a Danish tidal sea space. But a finalist's garbage-transportation shelter really captured my imagination.

The Design It: Shelter Competition asked entrants to design simple off-grid small shelters where a person could study and sleep. It could be anywhere on Earth as long as the plans didn't require removing any existing structures.

Slovenian architect Alexander Niño Ruiz designed a circular, functional rolling shelter for waste-collectors in Bogotá. Thousands of families in the Colombian city gather waste for recycling and sadly tend to find refuge from the elements in the very materials they pick up. Ruiz's corrugated metal barrels nest to form rolling storage. At night, the reflective wheel expands to become a protective space. While I'm not sure how easy--and inexpensive--it would be to construct one of these from scrap materials, I hope Ruiz puts his idea into motion.

Here's a video with more details about the Waste-Pickers Shelter:

Image: Rendering of a Waste-pickers shelter in Bogota at night. Credit: Alexander Niño Ruiz.