Thursday, June 28, 2007

Recent Graduates to Travel to Uganda

Din Botsford, Dolores O’Connor, and Lauren Shirley, members of the Class of 2007 in the architecture program, have received a AIA NY Chapter’s Stewardson Keefe LeBrun travel grant which will help facilitate their travel to Lira, Uganda for about one month late this summer. The team began to work on their proposal for safe and sanitary refugee housing in Asst. Professor Anselmo Canfora’s re:COVER studio during the spring semester. In the studio, teams of students developed designs for temporary shelter that would be appropriate to peoples in various situations all over the world.

The goal of Botsford, O’Connor, and Shirley’s work is to create housing for the people of Northern Uganda that will provide Ugandans with a means of self-sustenance. In the grant proposal they state: “We believe that by designing shelters independently equipped with sustainable sanitation technologies, entire communities can improve their quality of life and flourish without dependency on government resources or continuous foreign aid.”

The team’s design calls for the creation of three units: one for sleeping, one for rainwater collection, and one for solar cooking, which when assembled from pallet racks form a temporary home. During their stay in Uganda, the team members expect to fine tune their design based on the specific needs of the 1.5 million displaced people in the northern region of that nation.