Students in the College of the Arts, with the help of Scott Shall, an architecture professor, have created the streetURCHIN, an unholy marriage of plastic bags, bottles and rubber bands that come together to form a cheaply constructed dome-shaped shelter for the homeless. Their work is currently on display at the A+D Gallery in Chicago.

“We challenged the students to design an urban tent for Chicago’s homeless that was dryer, stronger and safer than the ones they currently use,” said Shall. He said students could only construct the tents out of materials from the dumpster, and the instructions had to be simple and able to be conveyed without words.

The result was the streetURCHIN.

“It’s a new way to approach materials,” said Kevin Dumatrait, an architecture student who worked on the streetURCHIN. “Kind of look at refuse, and trash, and realize how they have some kind of potential.”

Shall said the exhibit was in place in the front window of the gallery, and that the response has been “great.”

The structure itself is one of plastic bags and bottles held together by rubber bands. It forms a large dome that a homeless person could take shelter under. The streetURCHIN is designed to protect from both the wind and the rain. The entire thing can be constructed from what is essentially garbage

Shall said that the entire project took students only five weeks to complete it.

Shall said that the streetURCHIN would be on display in the Dean’s Gallery on the second floor of Fletcher Hall from April 13 to April 20, and that all students are invited to come view it.

He said that rather than shipping the original streetURCHIN to the exhibit in Chicago, students came up with a set of instructions that challenged museum patrons to take one of the instruction sheets and work with a homeless person to construct a shelter.

“We asked them to hang the instruction manuals in this kind of grid, so that you could see as people took them away so it’s kind of a performance piece in that regard,” said Shall. “You can see how people think about it. They’re looking at these things; they’re not sure whether to take them or not.”

Shall said that some students were currently working on what he called “version 2.0″ of the project, which was making a suitable floor from the same materials that could be used in conjunction with the urchin to protect from the cold ground.

Shall said the gallery’s administrators contacted him about displaying work from his International Design Clinic after seeing student work displayed in Romania. The IDC, which describes itself as “guerilla architecture and humanitarian design,” is an organization that aspires to help students enhance the lives of the less fortunate around the world.

IDC was also involved in Project Playhouse, a benefit for the Healing House of Lafayette which constructed three playhouses that were auctioned off for charity.

Shall said students were currently involved in another project to help the Healing House, and will eventually take a summer trip to India in 2008 to build portable schoolhouses.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 8:26 am and is filed under features, vermilion.