Head of Dallas' CityDesign Studio takes his shelter after the storm to SMU for the second Engineering & Humanity Week
The Living Village is back for its second year at SMU, serving as an interactive display and teaching tool for Engineering & Humanity Week April 15-20 as students live, cook and sleep in temporary shelters designed for international refugees and rapidly expanding urban populations.
By Robert Wilonsky
When Brent Brown's not running the CityDesign Studio at Dallas City Hall, he's heading up bcWORKSHOP in Deep Ellum -- the "bc" standing for "building community." Or rebuilding, more accurately, when you think about Brown and his group's work on Congo Street near Fair Park and Dolphin Heights and Cliff Temple Baptist Church and ...
To bcWORKSHOP's myriad projects, though, add one more: Rapido. Which is ...?
Well, the image above and video posted below should give you some idea -- some. I just found it on Vimeo, where there's a link to this page offering further explanation. But long story short: It's meant to provide temporary shelter after a storm.
At this very moment, Brown and the bcCORPS are on the SMU campus actually building the shelter -- for the very first time. It will make up the so-called Living Village being assembled yet again for the second Engineering & Humanity Week, an initiative of the Hunt Institute at the SMU Lyle School of Engineering that will take place on the Hilltop April 15-20. The Rapido Shelter is actually one of 11 such temporary homes being built for the event. Also among them will be Harvey Lacey's Ubuntu Blox, which the Wylie inventor fabricated out of discarded plastic packed into square blocks and has been building in Haiti; the iHouse , built in Flower Mound; and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban's Paper Log House.