Project Description

Coastal households in southwest Bangladesh experience repeated displacement due to cyclones, tidal surge, and river erosion. In post-disaster conditions, families reconstruct temporary shelters from bamboo and salvaged sheets near embankments and unstable land, often relocating multiple times as environmental conditions continue to shift. Informed by fieldwork in Jaliakhali, this project develops a 10 m3 transitional home that compresses essential living into a portable architectural core—designed for rapid assembly, dismantling, and relocation while preserving dignity during recovery.

The central design intention is to reframe post-disaster shelter not as a complete house, but as a guaranteed minimum of inhabitable space. The fixed 10 m3 volume functions as a survival core, accommodating sleeping, secure storage of documents and tools, and a small fold-down work surface. Rather than prescribing a finished enclosure, the project establishes a stable structural framework around which displaced households can reorganize everyday life during transition.

Spatially, the shelter prioritizes compact comfort through layered organization and vertical use of space. Internal elements are arranged to support rest, safekeeping, and basic daily activities while maintaining airflow and daylight within extreme limits. The structure is conceived as an open system: a bamboo-based frame wrapped by users with corrugated sheets, woven bamboo, or salvaged timber depending on availability. This user-completed envelope reflects local building practices and enables personalization, repair, and incremental growth over time.

Functionally, the shelter operates as a portable system. Modular bamboo components connect through simple joinery, allowing the structure to be dismantled into transportable parts and relocated using local three-wheelers. This mobility directly responds to repeated displacement, where permanence is rarely possible and rebuilding must happen quickly with limited resources. The shelter remains cost-effective, locally constructible, and adaptable to changing environmental conditions, supporting rapid deployment after disaster events.

The user experience centers on compressed but dignified living. Within the 10 m3 volume, occupants find a protected place to sleep, secure essential belongings, and carry out small tasks while broader recovery unfolds outside. Over time, families may wrap the core with additional layers or attach informal extensions, allowing the shelter to evolve from emergency refuge into everyday dwelling. In this way, the design accommodates both immediacy and continuity.

The strict 10 m3 constraint fundamentally shaped the project by forcing a reduction to architectural essentials. Instead of expanding outward, the design intensifies inward— prioritizing human-scaled comfort, adaptability, and agency within a tightly bounded volume. By translating lived practices of scavenging, self-assembly, and mobility into a resilient micro-architecture, the project proposes a future-ready model of post-disaster housing that transforms spatial limitation into a catalyst for recovery, autonomy, and long-term resilience.