Renzo Piano   Uganda   On the shore of Lake Victoria, a pediatric hospital seeks to provide medical care to young residents of the area while serving as a center for the training of local physicians and nurses. Equipped with three operating rooms and eighty beds, the hospi

Arquitectura Chile 15   Spain   With the health crisis that broke out last spring, the government of the Community of Madrid, through its regional health service, took several measures to try to curb the pandemic and provide urgent attention to the ill. The IFEMA field hospital mad

straddle3 Yaiza Terré Eulia Arkitektura   Spain   The aprop program for provisional housing launched by the City of Barcelona is designed to offer a swift, efficient, and pragmatic response to emergency situations caused by shortage of housing, keeping neighbors from having to leave gentrified distr

Baumschlager Eberle Architekten   Germany   The project MUF (Modulare Unterkunft für Flüchtlinge) is an initiative of Berlin’s City Hall that has been implemented by different housing associations, in this case Gesobau AG in collaboration with Baumschlager Eberle Architekten and the constructi

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Two years before his death, artist, filmmaker, and playwright Christoph Schlingensief managed to embark Kéré on his dream of building an opera house in the heart of Africa. While traveling through Burkina Faso in search of the adequate site, the coun

Renzo Piano   Uganda   Emergency’s new Center for Pediatric Surgery in Uganda, south of the city of Kampala, on the north shore of Lake Victoria, is not only a hospital of excellence, but a building that enriches the area in a number of ways. Emergency’s hospitals provide

Atelier U20   Germany   The semi-open courtyard and the timber latticeworks with patterns inspired in Islamic motifs, create a warm and friendly atmosphere for refugees arriving in Germany.

Shigeru Ban   Philippines   This is the temporary shelter built in Cebu, Philippines, following the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) in November of 2013. This project is the fourth version of a system of temporary shelters, first developed after the 1995 K

Shigeru Ban   Japan   Built with shipping containers, this community was created to address the shortage of housing after the earthquake of 2011 in Onagawa, in Miyagi Prefecture. Unlike the usual emergency units, which need a lot of flat land for construction, this projec

Shigeru Ban   Japan   After a natural disaster, and until temporary housing is built, those affected take shelter in public buildings or large facilities like sports centers. To address the problems of lack of privacy and overcrowding that emerge in these situations, the

Shigeru Ban   China   The Hualin Temporary Elementary School in the Chinese city of Chengdu replaces the old building that was torn down by the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008. The structure, made of paper tubes, was assembled by thirty architecture students of Keio Univer

Shigeru Ban   Sri Lanka   The earthquake of 26 December 2004 caused a catastrophic tsunami that took the life of 38,000 people in Sri Lanka. One of the devastated areas was Kirinda, a small community of Islamic fishermen located in the southern coast of the country. The recon

Alejandro Aravena ELEMENTAL   Chile   The earthquake of 8.8 that hit Chile in 2010 had a strong impact on the buildings, although the majority of them managed to stay standing. However, the tsunami that ensued was devastating because of the lack of preparation for this type of disaster.

Building Trust International   Thailand   The Mae Sot school is the first case in a large program involving the application of a light transportable modular system where industrialized elements and local materials can be combined.

Justo Isasi   It is fitting to use the name of the nurse Isabel Zendal, a key figure in the extraordinary expedition that took the smallpox vaccine to the confines of the Spanish Empire early in the 19th century, for the Community of Madrid’s new hospital for epid

The New York Times   Mira Ptacin   When we were told to stay inside our homes, a portion of the population quietly went below ground. The first tenant for one of Frank Woodworth’s underground bunkers wasn’t a human, it was a seed. “A couple of hippies called me up and asked me to buil

Ramón Araujo   Architecture plays an important role in the response to catastrophes of all kinds, and this role is raising a great amount of interest in society. Nevertheless, it must be made clear from the start that in emergency architecture, many conventional fe

The prefabricated, light and transportable module has deserved a lot of attention and research in modern architecture, but today its presence is rather modest, not to say scarce. The account of this elementary type could perhaps begin with Charlotte