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An international competition entry, Rebuildtree is a community transition, medical-civic facility for calamity victims. It is a prototype for social rebuilding through architecture as a transitional emergency learning facility that is built and dissembled using unconventional and sustainable materials found on site a disaster. The facility centers itself on a tree planted to grow where the tree becomes a humanistic, psychological, socio-cultural symbol for hope and meaning as it transitions people back to normal life.
In November 2013, typhoon Haiyan wreaked havoc in the Philippines by killing over 6,000 people. And with about 11 million affected and left homeless, it is time to take natural disasters seriously. The design problem calls for the use of architecture as a tool in creating a prototype emergency social rebuilding facility. This focuses on the need for a prototype, easy-to-construct, and typhoon-proof medical civicfacility that is adaptable to any disaster-affected community. Immediately after the impact of a calamity, survivors respond initially with confusion, disbelief. Victims will despair, seek reprieve in confusion and disbelief due to loss of family and home, losing the sense of meaning and will to live. The challenge then is to provide shelter and an architecture for social building.
A tree is planted at the outset of construction of the transition facility and allowed to grow in a center courtyard and become a symbol for a calamity-stricken people for social rebuilding. It becomes a human, socio-cultural symbol of meaning, hope and life for the transitioning people as they witness its growth while the people transition their lives to normalcy. A tree is resilient, and grows even after calamity, the same way is man who rebuilds even after deep suffering and loss. The community transition facility will be modular in construction
for its ease of assembly and used within a few years. After disassembly of the structure, the then fully grown tree will remain on site, adapted as a monument for human resiliency to rise again and rebuild from suffering and destruction.
To survive is to suffer, and to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. Sustainability is significant in this project not only ecologically, but is ethically responsible to human life. Majority of the construction materials for the facility's architecture will be found on site using ubiquitous material during natural disasters, furthuring the idea of rebuilding by itself using rebuilt materials.
Aerial View
Courtyard
Courtyard with Tree
Hallway
Interior Module