Global Studios (2021)

Designing a shelter for the displaced populations, an extremely prevalent topic in our world today, is an architectural challenge. Instead of designing a refugee shelter in a literal manner, we tackled the topic on a more conceptual level. The shelter has 28 doors with patterns and ornamentations depicting different cultures from around the world.

The notion of refuge, usually understood as a space created to overcome extreme conditions, should nowadays include poor economical situations and collective needs as such. What we are proposing is a new static frame for the refuge as a place to feel safe and to display personal or even community heritage with pride. 

We believe these individuals need another layer of protection. Our pavilion intends to be such a refuge, and its conception and organization reflects this mission.

If “refuge” relates to creating a shelter from the pursuit of danger, our refuge aims to become a vessel to reconnect visitors to a slower, more primordial world typically associated with rural life. At first sight the refuge appears hermetic and impenetrable—a wall—yet upon closer inspection one acknowledges its porosity and is allured inside. 

Drawing from historical cues, our fascination with the contextual character between Brisbane and Seoul meets through an exploration of color and local construction technologies. In low-density Brisbane, a city historically associated with timber-framed bungalows, the red color of corrugated iron roofing provides a strong cultural reference. In high density Seoul, the distinctive blue roof tiles and their embedded meaning of wealth and status give a heightened cultural connotation.

Intertwined is an alternative mode of refuge; offers an emergent dwelling in the metropolis by offering a meditative act of doing through weaving and knitting. It is a hand-knitted, tactile space that uses construction scaffolding units as a base structure and weaves within it.

The traditional definition of a refuge relates to the condition of being safe or sheltered from danger. From this point of view, the refuge isolates the individual from its environment and becomes an enclosed and self-su�cient “bubble.”

The shelter is a device that is not intended to be located in a specific place, but to be used in any context, facilitating the possibility of offering shelter in different situations and emergency places. A programmatically indeterminate first floor is proposed to allow different uses and to provide a shaded space for community usage. The second floor is a space that can be used for daily activities that require more privacy, while the third floor is mainly the sleeping space with a low ceiling that allows individuals to only sit or lie down.