mass timber post-disaster housing: spring 2020
Advisor: Judith Kinnard
Partner: Nick LiCausi
Project Location: U.S. Gulf South
Global warming is set to increase the intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes, and thus flooding, in the Gulf South. One of the main causes of global warming is carbon emissions, and one of the main contributors to carbon emissions in the United States is transportation. If we collectively seek to lessen the effects of global warming, we will begin to phase out personal gas-powered vehicles and instead turn to electric vehicles and mass transit options. Thus, in the future, parking garages and parking lots will be less used.
However, even if we phased out personal vehicles immediately, global warming is still set to increase the intensity of flooding in the Gulf South. There might be an increase in the need for disaster relief housing, particularly in places like New Orleans which are low-lying and susceptible to heavy rain and storm surge flooding.
One type of building that will be less used in the future and fits many needs of disaster relief housing are parking garages. For this reason, we propose parking garages as an ideal typology of an existing building for the insertion of disaster relief housing and, once the threat of disaster is past, repurposing.
To bolster efforts to combat global warming, to offset the embodied carbon existing in the concrete parking structure, and to go toward achieving net zero energy, we suggest that these housing structures be built from CLT.
This project was developed in Spring 2020 during the COVID-19 quarantine and as such, the final presentation of the project was digital. The presentation may be viewed below.