Far from his home in Reykjavik, Iceland, at the height of a desert storm in Nevada, Vinay Gupta had an epiphany. He was at the 2003 Burning Man arts festival, inside a six-sided structure he had invented and named the hexayurt. “I was inside, and I knew I’d changed the world,” Gupta said. “We’re comfortable in here, while outside there’s a whiteout dust storm, it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and this cost $100.”
Since then, Gupta has worked on transforming the hexayurt into an easily transported, cheap and sustainable shelter for refugees, rural villagers, disaster victims, and others.
“Take 12 sheets of standard industrial board material, cut six in half, tape or screw them together, and move in,” Gupta said. “Boom: there’s your global housing.” Bringing hexayurts to practical use and developing their industrial production is a challenge, said Arthur Zwern, chief technical officer of Progressive Building Solutions (PBS), the commercial arm of the hexayurt concept. A physicist by training, Zwern became enthused about the concept after seeing it in Black Rock City, NV in 2007. He has since met with the American Red Cross and officials in many cities, including Ontario, California. Zwern said cities are interested in using hexayurts for emergencies. Local governments could stockpile them cooperatively.
A standard 40’ shipping container holds 80 unassembled hexayurts and can be transported by rail, truck or ship. Under one rapid hexayurt deployment plan, trucks loaded with hexayurt materials (industrial boards, tape and saws) are driven to relief sites. There unassembled hexayurts can be stacked 12 or 15 to a pickup truck for targeted distribution.
“You could pull [a packed hexayurt] behind a bicycle, a donkey or a pickup,” Zwern said. The materials for a unit can be carried by two people, and an experienced crew can construct a hexayurt in two hours. The construction process is easy to learn in the field, so the number of competent builders could grow rapidly.
Hexayurts were used in a five-day rapid deployment exercise of a simulated bio-weapon and cyber-attack on San Diego, CA called Strong Angel III. During the event, a communications firm successfully ran a field Internet communications center from a hexayurt.
Gupta has made the design and other information freely available online (see Resources). Videos on his website and Progressive Building Solution’s website show construction with box cutters and industrial tape, and YouTube also has numerous hexayurt videos, some made by enthusiasts, most by Gupta or Zwern.
World’s Shelter
Gupta wants to make the hexayurt available for the billions of people living on the streets or in slums worldwide. With heavier materials, the shelter could last 20 years.
“A house on its own is nothing,” Gupta said, however. “You need infrastructure. [The homeless] don’t have grid power, they don’t have toilets.”
To design an inexpensive infrastructure system for the hexayurt, Gupta collaborated with the US Marine Corps, the National Defense University and the American Red Cross. Called STAR-TIDES, the group developed sewage, water and power systems for the hexayurt.
The infrastructure kit includes a solar panel to charge batteries, which power fluorescent lights and a cheap telephone or computer. An efficient wood or gas stove provides cooking, supplemented with a solar pasteurizer and solar cooker. A thermophilic composting toilet system completes the kit. The cost of a fully-equipped hexayurt? Around $500, cheap compared to a FEMA trailer for $16,000 to $20,000.
Recognizing the global need for shelter, Gupta developed the Soft Developmen Paths concept as an alternative to conventional development. Relying on “cheap open source technologies, retaining personal food security where it’s reasonable," he envisions stabilizing half of the planet’s population in sustainable lifestyles. “What’s the ecological impact of three billion people improving their lives this way?” Gupta said. “Practically nothing.”
Photos courtesy Vinay Gupta
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