Paper Tube Emergency Shelter: Design Experiments for Refugees

An emergency shelter design as an immediate response to assist people in disaster situations was evaluated in this study. The design experiment concerns the use of recyclable paper tubes and simple construction techniques so that unskilled labor can quickly and readily assemble the shelter where required. The design exercise is a result of a joint effort of a group of architecture students at Inha University with the help of an architect, Shigeru Ban, who is renowned for his innovative work with paper tubes. In the first phase, five different design alternatives for a short term recovery option are proposed and in the second phase, a design was selected and developed on the full scale to demonstrate its design and assembly technique.