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Nick van Dorp

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A SYSTEM TO USE EMPTY OFFICE-SPACE AS A HOST FOR REFUGEE HOUSING

THEME: SMART-Environments

LOCATION: EUROPOINT-Towers, Rotterdam (formerly known as Marconi-torens)

ABSTRACT

Refugees, who fled from their country, have often experienced unimaginable tragic events. After a long and fatiguing journey, and likely to be traumatized and exhausted, they arrive at a place where food, shelter and various services are provided. Amongst them are mostly kids, for whom these events will form a memory which will be with them for the rest of their lives. However, right now these environments are set up in short time with little attention for spatial hierarchies, individually varying specific demands, privacy and social safety. For kids, the world suddenly becomes no bigger than the camp they live in, which detrimental for their personal development. However, in the Netherlands, almost 15% of total office space is unused. Maintaining these spaces costs money and energy. Using these spaces for refugee housing would be a win-win situation.

GOAL:

Using empty office space as a host for refugee housing units, by making an interior, parasitic system that can be installed in unused offices. The idea is that a mutual benefit of the two symbionts, being the refugees and the empty offices, will result in a symbiosis.

SUBGOALS

- Generate different arrangements, sizes, functions of units for different preferences and needs.

- Using different materials for units with different lifespans.

- Integrating actuators into the components, to embed interactive systems employed for spatial reconfiguration and climate control, CO2 reduction, and distributed and renewable energy production.

- Linking energy flows to that of the office.

Parametric design and D2RP could streamline the design- and production-process to be more fitting to the needs of (traumatized) refugees, by rapidly generating and producing custom made living units and organizing them in a suiting formation in relation to their neighbours.

Key tasks for now are researching: the exact problems and needs of refugees; the amounts of refugees that arrive in and leave from camps; the composition and origin of families; the way refugees use their units' facilities; the spatial and sustainable possibilities to use office-space as a host.