By Bojan Preradovic
Special to The Daily Star
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
BEIRUT: "A good solution is a simple solution," says Nachaat Ouayda, managing partner of IDEA sarl. Ouayda and his partner, Sami Markus, are both architects who met while teaching at the American University of Beirut in the late 1980's. The brainchild of their collaboration is IDEA sarl, an architectural and professional management practice and consultancy firm, which a year after the 2006 war with Israel is attempting to raise awareness of an innovation in temporary housing, engineered by Ouayda and Markus themselves.
The relevance of IDEA's conception is even more prominent in the minds of its creators because of the problem posed by the current conflict between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants, and the extensive destruction that the latter has caused in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp.
"Project R" evolved as a solution to the problems that arose as a result of Israel's 34-day massive bombing campaign against Lebanon - most notably, the rubble that countless houses in the South of the country had been reduced to. The latter, coupled with an urgent need to find shelter for close to a million displaced people, compelled Ouayda and Markus to come up with an alternative to the conventional prefabricated concrete housing units and porta-cabins.
"Mind you, this is not a house," emphasizes Ouayda.
"This unit is transitional shelter," he continues, "and it's not meant to replace permanent houses in villages."
Citing the advantages of using "Project R" units, Ouayda adds that "you don't need any steel or concrete, and no specialized skilled manpower, while no foundations and a minimal amount of raw material are required."
The absence of a need for the latter was a fundamental feature of the product aimed at the disaster zone in Lebanon's South, because the widespread destruction that the region's bridges and roads had undergone would have made material transportation a cumbersome affair to say the least.
Markus and Ouayda hence decided that the raw material would be the rubble itself, conceptualizing "a 70 m2 house that can be built from the rubble obtained from a 150 m2 house."
The most prominent feature of the design is the 'Gabion system', which is a wire mesh module doubly coated with zinc and aluminum, and used for wall retention in architectural systems. If ground transportation facilities have been impaired, as they were in Lebanon following last summer's war, a large volume of the wire mesh can easily be folded and airlifted to the desired destination.
Pieces of rubble, 10 to 20 cm in size, are used to fill the Gabion module, which, because of its resulting labyrinth-like internal arrangement, maintains the heat and moisture-resistant property of the one meter-wide wall. At the same time, the Gabion mesh is easily obtainable on the market, already folded in boxes.
The roof of the structure, a sandwich panel insulated by light-weight steel sheets, is probably the most expensive piece of the puzzle, and would require a light-weight crane to lift and position it onto the 'rubble house'.
Most importantly, "Project R" is competitive in terms of cost, because "the total cost of this system is about 50 or 60 percent less than the same metric area that another conventional temporary housing system can provide."
But Ouayda is emphatic about the fact that his invention "is not supposed to compete with or replace porta-cabins and prefabricated concrete units."
On August 14 of last year, after the cease-fire, the "Project R" concept was published in various newspapers. However, Ouayda and Markus purposely did not register their novelty for copyright before telling the world about it, so that civil communities and the Lebanese people themselves could put the model to use without incurring any additional costs.IDEA's innovation, like any pioneering creation, was greeted with suspicion and skepticism by government officials and NGO's alike, to whom the concept was pitched. The classic "it sounds too good to be true" reaction was pervasive, and "Project R" would not see the light of day until friends of the managing partners and believers in the product invested their own money to construct a test model at a space provided by the Ghobeiry municipality.
"I had several concerns about the test model," Ouayda says, "one of which was the protection against elements, meaning rain, heat and all other types of weather.
"The model performed wonderfully though," he enthuses, "and tests indicated that it was stable because of its weight, height, and thickness, and it can perform seismically even though no concrete is used in the structure except for a thin layer on the floor."
Beside the mixed reaction to IDEA's innovation, the completion of the model itself would maintain the cycle of bad luck. "The model was finished on December 1 of last year, but that was also the day when the current political turmoil started," says Ouayda, in reference to the ten-month old power struggle between the government and opposition, "so we never had a chance to conduct a mass media campaign.
"This product can be put to use in Nahr al-Bared right now," he suggests, and adds that "what they want to do now is rent land to buy and place prefabricated houses while they clear the rubble and then reconstruct the camp.
"Instead, with "Project R," they can rent the land, sort and clear the rubble onto this rented land, and construct the temporary houses using the proposed Gabion system to provide immediate shelter for the refugees.
"That way, they would have sorted 90 percent of the rubble already, and it would be easy to clear off or recycle once the reconstruction of the camp is completed," Ouayda adds.
Base units are not designed exclusively as lodging formations. They can be combined and subdivided to make multi-purpose structures, such as medical, education and business centers.
Probably the most attractive feature of the unit, as Ouayda outlines and as far as environmentalists are concerned, is that they can be used again - the rubble used as filling for the walls can be transported back to gravel rehabilitation sites, quarries, as well as river banks, while the same material can be recycled in the construction of libraries, townhouses, and other communal buildings.
"The difficulties we have endured with this project so far have been out of our hands," Ouayda states.
"But I hope that the disadvantaged and displaced people of Lebanon can finally put this innovation to use and supplement what is already available on the temporary housing market, in order to find a more effective solution for the problems of the community."
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