The B-Pod

[Eric Hunting]

Here's an idea that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for some time. 

I've long had a fascination with the concept I call 'furnitecture'; free-standing structures that bridge the roles of furniture and architecture, such as Ken Isaacs' Living Structures, or the 'pod' furniture and 'pod living' concepts that emerged in the 1960s and have seen a revival of late with new interest in microhousing. I've been particularly interested in relief shelter applications and the idea of more comfortable, safer, and durable alternatives to the traditional tent. There is a lot of interest in relief design among younger, more conscientious, designers today, but their often very high-tech, highly specialized, heavy-industry-dependent concepts overlook the potential of, and need for, using local low-tech industrial capability. Re-establishing or reinforcing local/regional industry is a key aspect of restoring local economies in the wake of emergencies or disasters, particularly when relief efforts become protracted. Developed or developing world alike, governments generally handle relief very badly, applying militaristic first-response tactics then failing to follow-up effectively on the often arduous path to a return to normal productive life because of a chronic and extreme under-estimation of the scope and duration of functional relief effort. Can the design of light, mobile, relief shelter, in addition to offering better basic living conditions, also be used to encourage local industrial development, creating new light industrial and commercial possibilities through adaptive reuse over the extended cycle of a relief situation? What is the practical value of the 'hackability' of shelter technology? What if we thought about relief shelter as an industrial ecology rather than just some prefab product? This is something I've long been pondering and which became the basis of an idea I'm calling B-Pod. 

Long ago I considered the possibility of re-inventing the well-known Japanese Capsule Hotel unit into something self-contained and mobile as an alternative to the common camping tent. A rigid fiberglass pod that could be super-insulated to handle a broad spectrum of climates, could integrate a variety of utilities and appliances like solar power and water supplies, heating and cooling, low energy lighting, telecommunications, and so on. These 'microcabins' might be mounted on bicycle wheels allowing them to be moved like a hand cart or towed by bicycles and small ATVs. Or they might be carried in stacks on vehicles--even used fixed-mounted to the roof or flat bed of a vehicle. Obviously, this is a lot more bulky than a tent and would only be practical in the context of extreme weather or extended duration camping. Now. this is not exactly a global relief shelter solution, but the basic notion of a similar sort of rigid microcabin is common to a lot of these concepts. 

Responding to an earthquake disaster in a mountainous region of Turkey in the 1970s, German engineers once devised a system for making temporary rigid dome shelters using reusable inflatable forms and polyurethane foam mixed on-site that could all be easily carried by hand or on horses and donkeys to reach areas inaccessible to vehicles. The domes were astoundingly light when cured and a few people could easily move them whole to any nearby location after they were made. Owing to the typical nature of government disaster response in poor communities, these domes, intended only to serve for a matter of months, wound up being used as permanent homes for many decades. The chemistry of such structural foams was still in its relative infancy in the '70s and problems did crop up from their flammability, chemical deterioration, and limited repairability. But occupants found these simply designed domes easily hackable, 'upgrading' them with found materials in various ways and sometimes growing them into full-scale houses. Some may still be in use even today. 

Some years ago the design group N55 in Denmark explored an interesting mobile microcabin concept called the Snail Shell System;

http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/SSS.html

This concept repurposed an off-the-shelf HDPE water tank (apparently one unique to the region as I've never seen it's like elsewhere) into a simple waterproof shelter that could even float on water. Turned on its side with the occupant's belongings stowed in rigid interior containers, the whole thing could be rolled on rubber treads to move it from place to place. It was probably not the easiest thing to get in and out of and there was no integral insulation, but the translucent plastic allowed for a nice amount of natural lighting and created a pleasant atmosphere inside. A similar concept was explored with much larger tanks by Australia's arctic research program, adding the benefit of a foamed PE core to the rigid plastic structure. It was intended as a lower-cost alternative to the fiberglass shelled Futuro-inspired prefab arctic habitats that often need heavy aircraft or construction vehicles to transport. It proved workable,even demonstrating deployment from boats, though suffered from problems with internal condensation and inadequate space for the number of intended occupants. 

Recently, we have seen a variety of alternatives to the Capsule Hotel unit appear with intended applications such as festival accommodations, sleeping bunks in data centers, and homeless shelters. Invariably, these have been based on high-tech industrial materials, though some have been more accessible and 'hackable' than others. One of the smartest concepts was been the Hexayurt invented by Vinay Gupta--a well known project in the Maker world. But even as cheap, ubiquitous, and hackable, as its use of aluminized foam panel is, it's not a material that can be readily produced in a low-tech situation with indigenous materials.

There seems to be a lot of potential benefits to these basic concepts. Is it possible to take those virtues and apply them with lower-tech materials and industry? What if something like the Snail Shell or a self-contained Capsule Hotel microcabin could be fashioned out of locally produced materials like bamboo? Thus I imagined something like the concrete pipe cabins of the Daspark Hotel in Germany ( http://www.dasparkhotel.net/rooms/ ) but fashioned instead out of woven bamboo or rattan with iwoven-in ntegral features, like the bedding platform, shelving, and the like. Such a structure could serve as a skeleton to which an outer membrane of waterproof tent material is applied--basically as a tube with cinched ends--while, inside, a quilted lining would provide insulation. Simple futons could provide bedding and a woven surface like tatami would be suitable for a seating surface. Rigid doors could be applied, or curtains could be used as doors. With the basic form-factor of the Daspark design, we have a lot of space under a sleeping/sitting platform that could be used for a relief supplies kit, general storage, or some simple utilities. Some appropriate high-tech items that could use this space might be a phase-change solar heater, pedal-powered generator, roll-up solar cells, LED lighting. large plastic water containers, . A phase-change solar heater would be a simple sock-like tube that, during the day, would be draped over the shelter to collect solar heat then, at night, inserted under the platform to re-radiate it. LED lighting is commonly available in simple low power lighting strips that would easily be strapped to different places inside the shelter. Rubber/plastic tread rings like the treads of the Snail Shell could be attached to the outside to make the whole structural easily rollable, perhaps using an axis bar on the ends attaching to a hand tow bar by ropes. Units could be grouped radially into family clusters under a central shade tarp and attached end-to-end to increase unit volume. Minor variations in design based on different woven-in sectional shapes would accommodate uses such as shower stalls, bulk storage, dinettes, work tables/desks, and so on. 

But, of course, there are many more shapes that could potentially be woven like this and used as various forms of prefab structure. Today we are seeing the appearance of many kinds of rattan/wicker based 'pod' furniture. These often take the forms of egg, onion, teardrop, and spheroid shaped shells used to enclose beds, daybeds, small rooms, pet beds, and the like;

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7t5wK2LiEPk/TAYiz-htKoI/AAAAAAAAAI0/aNC9zgq5IQk/s1600/2.jpg

http://dissmiss.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Treetop_Dining_Pod-600x375.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lq6weq2qmg1qbp9v2.jpg

Such more elaborate shapes offer additional possibilities. Not only are many more uses and house-scale structures possible, they can be made into much more resilient structures by the addition of surface renderings. These woven forms would be suited to serving as an alternative to metal mesh for ferro-cement construction. And, of course, one need not use cement. Adobe renderings could serve about as well. They could also be the basis of crude fiberglass shells, using resin and cloth. So the original relief shelter could serve as a kind of training technology--deliberately intended to be reverse-engineered so that their hacking becomes an indigenous industry capable of many kinds of structure built with the same general technique. 

But what do we know about the bamboo/rattan weaving industry and the engineering of such structures? How widespread is this basic technology and how much can we expand upon it with a little contemporary design? There are certainly some of the most common and low-cost durable materials and various forms of weaving are universal among all cultures. How difficult would it be to prototype concept shelters here in the US--where everything simple has a habit of becoming impossible thanks to the distortions of market logic. It seems an intriguing idea.