For our weekly Lunch and Learn session, we invited Rajendra and Rupal Desai from the National Center for Peoples’ Action in Disaster Preparedness (NCPDP) to our San Francisco headquarters. NCPDP was founded in 2000 and promotes using local construction practices and disaster resistant technologies to rebuild. They talked about lessons learned from the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir.

Rajendra said most damage from the earthquake was caused by poor quality construction and structural weaknesses, such as cracks. People were scared to rebuild with rubble and therefore began using brick, cement and steel. They also started building lighter sheds made out of tin and timber. Rajendra said people had very little knowledge about the materials and were stuck paying high transportation costs.

Last night our dedicated volunteers convened for a design review of four schools on our project board. Attentive–and somewhat fatigued–participants and guests assembled in the Gro Kay Disko living room to share ideas. Megan Roy, Haiti team member four weeks standing, reflects on the review:

The bunk room at the Architecture for Humanity house in the hills of Petionville is currently overflowing with summer volunteers, mostly graduate architecture students who will be returning to school in a few short weeks. As another volunteer and I compared our drastically different design solutions for the rural Good Samaritan school yesterday over lunch, Eric decided that a late night design review was much overdue!

Architecture for Humanity would like to congratulate David de Rothschild, Adventure Ecology, and the entire Plastiki team for a successful expedition and campaign championing the protection of the world's oceans from the degredation of disposable plastics.

The Plastiki story highlights the importance of innovation to climb from this age of plastic waste towards Cradle to Cradle solutions. The Plastiki cabin was designed by Architecture For Humanity architects Nathaniel Corum and Michael Jones who shaped the boat's srPET exterior into an efficient and iconic shell. The cabin's triangulated tortoise-like structure is inherently strong and collected valuable drinking water for the crew during the 4 month journey.

Architecture For Humanity is proud to be part of the Plastiki team.

A message from Bernardo Maldonado of our Monterrey chapter:

Last month, Hurricane Alex dropped 616mm of rain in 60 hours taking 15 lives. Early damage calculations estimate $800-$1,000 Million USD for reconstruction of main infrastructure, not including housing. This numbers will easily go up 2 or 3 times for Nuevo Leon. The other two states adjacent to NL affected were Coahuila and Tamaulipas that together probably sum another $2 billion.

No official final numbers have been published yet but so far 43 out of 51 municipalities are in a state of disaster. Most of the poorest ones are located outside the metropolitan area and south of the State. These are counties like Arramberri, Montemorelos, Zaragosa, Hualahuises, among others. North of the state communities were affected by the Rio Bravo flooding. Anahuac was completely flooded with 20,000 people displaced. Initial damages are estimated around $160M USD, a county with an annual Budget of $9 million.

Millions of refugees and internally displaced people live in deplorable conditions, and thousands more have lost homes from natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Haiti. Rafael Smith wants to change that. He runs the Uber Shelter Project, and he attended our weekly Lunch and Learn session to tell us about his organization's prototype for emergency relief housing.

Rafael designed the first Uber Shelter as part of his senior thesis while studying at Purdue University. Now he works with two other Purdue grads to design and produce emergency relief houses. Their prototype is portable, recyclable and easy to assemble--no power tools required. In fact, all you need is four people, a wrench and a ratchet. Watch it grow in this video clip: http://www.youtube.com/ubershelterproject.