Impermanent Permanence: TRANSITIONAL HOUSING - A COMMUNITY FOR THE HOMELESS

Homelessness is increasing dramatically- a symptom of economic crisis and unemployment, highlighting now, more than ever, the deficit of social, housing and welfare policies, in Greece.
In 2015, there was an international open call to architects.
A committee of architects – members of A.I.A. North Carolina – created a new field, called DESIGN ACTIVISM, seeking to address social issues, through public dialogue and architecture. Activate 14’s Tiny Home Community Competition’s brief is addressing the problem of homelessness, through a new perspective. Their program, suggests a new community, to be placed on leftover city land, within an average neighborhood. In it, homeless people live among average families (in a residential area) as individuals – not institutionalized. n a less tensed - that an urban center – environment, this community is meant to remind its residents, how to cooperate. This proposal also includes:
Communal responsibilities, in lieu of rent. A preparation stage for a potential work environment. Promoting the individuality of its residents, creating a sense of importance and home, and encouraging them to mingle with the locals.
It is an EXPERIMENT that if it succeeds, it can be repeated; if it doesn’t, the homes can be moved and become integrated elsewhere. It is a low cost sustainable housing system, based on prefabrication, programming, and downsizing of the living space; a call, to the right to adequate housing and adequate standard of living. It is proposed at a time when millions around the world live in life- or health threatening conditions, in overcrowded slums and informal settlements, or in other conditions, which do not uphold their human rights and their dignity, further millions are forcibly evicted, or threatened with forced eviction, from their homes every year. The time calls for planning long term solutions that would address this global problem.
In order to address this issue on a world scale we have organized dynamic balancing systems, creating a structure that is:
•Flexible, transformable, portable and yet rigid enough to give its residents a sense of importance and home.
•Prefabricated, but none the less, able to blend in with the surrounding environment
•Low-cost, sustainable, contemporary, offering adequate houses
We attempt to achieve these objectives through:
1. Programming
2. Integration
3. Mass production
-Its design is based on a modular program, which follows the balanced scaling of preset absolute sizes and orders of articulation of prefabricated structural elements. It included different types of houses, even tiny ones (detached, semidetached or attached) which are modulated, in order to form communities and accommodate individuals in larger scale residential plans. - MODULARITY
-It is based on appropriate use of technology, ordinary means of construction and use of local materials.
USAGE – It also offers shelter for people affected by disasters (natural or man-made),for the most vulnerable groups in society, and also an alternative way of sustainable housing.
It is an architecture that is responsible for any structure that aims at sheltering human activity.
PHILOSOPHY - We try to redefine the home, with a manner that most closely approximates the essence of our existence. So that the "shelter" can become a given for everyone …to follow us like a turtle’s shell ... Our "home" is our shell, our corollary...Our time, as people on this planet is definite ... as though society, as humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years and will continue to exist ... Monumental architecture, the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia still stand as they should to remind us this fact. .... but memory is a way to keep the conscience of our society because through it we create bonds with people around us, we remember our ancestors, we realize the essence of our existence .... (i.e. the person is finite compared to the potentially infinite humanity) .... The house, as an integral life container, should be approached as this particular character of our existence..
..this IMPERMANENT PERMANENCE