A creative agency has proposed housing the city’s 62k homeless people in 3D printed pods that hang from the side of buildings. Here are images and details of the full project.
As of September 2017, there were 62,351 homeless people, including 15,553 families with 23,445 children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. But you don’t need us to tell you that the city has a problem. One design firm thinks then might have the solution.
Framlab, an Oslo and NYC based creative agency, has proposed a new type of architecture for housing New York City’s growing homeless population. Homed, the project in question is intended to provide the city’s homeless with “shelter with dignity.” It is comprised of partly 3D-printed modular temporary housing that hangs from scaffolding on the sides of unused building facades.
The hexagonal pods use scaffolding to attach to the sides of the city’s many windowless building facades and designed to be easily customized for different purposes and transported to different sites. Here’s Framlab says on their site:
Homed is a proposal that seeks to capitalize on this “vertical land”. In conjunction with a flexible framework that already exists in the city – scaffolding – hexagon-shaped housing modules are designed to connect to the scaffolding structure, pack densely, and create a second, active layer on top of the empty wall. In aggregate, this forms clusters of suspended micro-neighborhoods of shelters for the city’s least fortunate.
After Mayor Bill de Blasio’s re-election victory this month, his administration offered more details on his ambitious Housing New York 2.0 initiative. Whereas rent stabilization and the creation of more affordable housing IS important, it does little for the 15k families that are already living in shelters.
Framlab recognizes that they are not a singular solution to the situation to the homeless crisis but could certainly play a part in the solution. Check out some images from Homed:
Featured image source [Framlab | Homed]