HEXI HOUSE CONCEPT
quality buildings and, although Hexi-House is easily the smallest building I have ever designed, it is a surprisingly challenging project to work on.
Q
How has having the backing of the arts
council helped in your design ambitions?
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s CIIF funding has been a great help to us. We only became aware of it a couple of weeks after we decided to take the project further and when it was confirmed we had secured funding, we were then able to work much more intensely on the development of the product and move the project forward a lot quicker. They have also provided mentoring which has been a great help.
Q
What brief did you set yourselves for this
project?
We plan to create a relief shelter that is largely made from sustainable materials with the potential that components from it can also be recycled when it gets to the end of its life. We wanted Hexi-House to be an easy to assemble; modular, family unit offering a wide range of adaptations and flexibility. It is hoped that its three-five year design life will provide families with enough breathing space to enable them to rebuild their lives following a disaster.
Q
What are the main requirements and
principals of a disaster relief shelter? What was an absolute must for the concept? It is vital that a shelter is easy to assemble and as affordable as possible. It is also important that the interior makes the most of all the available space and that the house can either operate as a
series of interconnected modules or a stand-alone unit. Its versatility for a range of settings is also vital and it should have a number of bolt-on features available to suite different scenarios.
Q
How do you keep the costs down?
We plan to source most of the proposed materials from the packaging industry using wooden pallets, modified cardboard panels and cardboard tubing for much of the structure. The house will arrive on site as two fully loaded pallets and by the time it is built, virtually all the material will be used – including the pallets it arrived on.
Q
What stage of the project are you at?
We intend to concentrate now on the detailing of the house and the testing of its strength and durability. We also plan to get in touch with charities and NGO’s
over the coming weeks to assess the potential market for this product.
Q
Do you have any further concepts that deal with
disaster relief? We do, Apart from exploring all the endless permutations of Hexi- House which are many, we would eventually like to create a Hexi- House 2 which would be a larger prefabricated house aimed at addressing the needs of the urban poor.
Q
Are you planning any more projects as a
father/son team?
As we are hoping to launch Hexi- House within the next year I suspect that we will be doing well if we even manage to squeeze in the odd jazz performance between now and then!
www.architectni.com ArchitectNews.co.uk | Architects Choice | 27
Photograph by Donal McCann
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