TECH
Authors: Latka Jerzy F. 
Published: November 2023

TECH: Transportable Emergency Cardboard House was a project involving shelters for people in difficult housing situations.

The TECH project was based on previously conducted research. The fundamental research on paper, presented in Chapter 2, focused on the material itself, its mechanical properties, its chemical and physical structure, its production methods and elements mass-produced by the paper industry. Next, research was conducted on the applications of paper products in design and architecture. The sixteen realised structures, in which paper was employed as a building material, were analysed for their structural systems, the paper products used, the connections made between the structural elements, the connections with the ground, the impregnation methods deployed and the design and implementation processes involved. Lastly, the paper emergency structures realised in the form of prototypes, in which different paper products and structural systems were examined, resulted in the further guidelines for paper emergency shelters presented in Chapter 6.

A column-and-beam structural system was chosen as it is a simple system that can be built quickly without professional construction workers and without special equipment and tools.

The chosen structural system consists of slender elements in the form of columns and beams. To build that system cardboard U- and L-shapes were used.

Paper tubes, which were an alternative for the U- and L-shapes, are hard products to connect to other types of building components due to their geometry. Either the paper tubes are placed inside a building, taking up space that may already be limited, or they are incorporated into the envelope, where they are subject to external conditions. For this reason, it is more practical to use paper products such as L- and U-shapes as structural elements.

The TECH project was targeted at forcibly displaced and homeless people. Please refer to Chapter 5 to read more research on motivations and guidelines for emergency and relief shelters.

The number of forcibly displaced people was estimated to be 65.6 million at the end of 2016. [2] Forcibly displaced people are people who had to flee their houses and cities because of persecution, conflicts, generalised violence or human rights violations. Three different categories of forcibly displaced people can be distinguished:

• Internally displaced people (IDPs)

• Refugees

• Asylum seekers

The number of homeless people living rough or in shelters or hostels provided by aid organisations in developed countries was 1,777,308 in 2015. 

Asylum seekers who come to Europe but are not granted refugee status run the risk of becoming homeless.

Each of the aforementioned groups requires different types of support, including housing. As far as accommodation is concerned, the support they receive may come in the form of mass shelters, dispersed settlements, hosting families or spontaneous or planned camps.

TECH is an acronym for Transportable Emergency Cardboard House. The designations ‘TECH 01’, ‘TECH 02’ and ‘TECH 03’) refer to successive versions of the project where structural parts and building components and impregnation techniques were improved.

There are three generations of TECH. While TECH 01 was prepared as an unbuilt project and only the prototype of the wall structure was executed, TECH 02 and TECH 03 were executed as 1:1 scale prototypes. TECH 02 was exhibited at the campus of TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture for several days. TECH 03 was built in September 2016. Since then it has been at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology’s Faculty of Architecture, where it is exposed to natural conditions and changing weather conditions.

In general it can be said that TECH is a group of solutions for emergency and temporary housing, which can be used to serve people in difficult housing situations. However, TECH 03, also known as ‘the House of Cards’, may also serve as a commercial structure. It can be used as a garden or summer house, as an extension of existing buildings, shed, temporary office building, hotel room or storage space for events like trade fairs, exhibitions, major sporting events, etc. TECH 03 was designed to meet European architectural standards, especially with regard to thermal insulation.

This chapter is mainly concerned with the structural system of the TECH solutions, as well as the paper products used as building components, the usability and feasibility of the shelters and their production methods.