said at the time. “The greater challenge is to provide longerterm provisional housing for what could be thousands of displaced families while their communities are rebuilt.” It is a challenge that got a lot of people thinking. The city received 117 proposals from 52 different countries, providing the city with a wealth of ideas— some practical, some fanciful. Impromptu complexes of honeycomb hexagons, floating villages on piers, barges, even a requisitioned cruise ship. Flatpack solutions (think an IKEA box) that blossom like an accordion or pop up like Transformers. Giant Erector sets, a few inflatable models like one of those carnival bouncy rides. There was even a fleet of flying dirigibles, each with an apartment inside, that could float above people’s homes. The city selected 10 winners and
blimps and cruise ships, the city settled on the humble shipping container, which a number of entrants had proposed. “Logistically, it’s not as though you’ve got a bunch of cruise ships lying around that you can requisition,” Burney said. But he did point out that barges are not as ridiculous as they might sound, either. After all, the Department of Corrections operates the gigantic Vernon C. Bain prison barge, moored off Hunts Point in the Bronx, which houses up to 800 prisoners. “We kept coming back to the shipping containers, because they’re a fairly known quantity in terms of technology and even design,” Burney continued. “It’s rather cool these days to have a house made out of a shipping container.” In 2009, the city released a request for expressions of interest, to see who might be game
Carved out of shipping Containers, these lego-like, staCkable apartments offer all the amenities of home. or more, sinCe they are bigger and brighter than the typiCal manhattan studio. it’s the fema trailer of the future, built with the dwell reader in mind. mind. At the time, he was working as a designer at OEM, updating the city’s disaster-response plans, and Hurricane Katrina served as a wake-up call. The following year, the city held a contest—called What If NYC—for long-term disasterhousing ideas, with an emphasis on 10 criteria. The units must be able to house a high number of people, be rapidly deployable across a range of geographies, and have numerous configurations for different family sizes. They had to be reusable, comfortable, ADA-compliant, secure and both cost- and energy-efficient. And the city wanted something recognizable, to “maximize the ability of New Yorkers to feel a sense of identity and even pride in where they live,” as the competition brief put it. All this from what is basically a glorified mobile home. “If a storm were to hit, our immediate need for shelter would be met,” Bloomberg
10 runners-up in September 2008 that are featured on the website WhatIfNYC.net. It is a blueprint for recovery. “We hope this will serve as a guide for the best practices, not only for New York but the entire nation, and the world,” Brown, the CUNY professor, said. After much fanfare around the competition, the project seemed to go dormant, but only because it went underground. Burney explained it was best to work on the project in private, so as not to alarm the public about the possibilities of a disaster, and to have the freedom to let the design develop. “Because of the broad range of entries, there was a lot of work for the city to do to turn it into something,” said Paul Freitag, a competition juror who is a managing director at the Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the city’s top affordablehousing developers. After briefly mulling barges,
to undertake such a project, or even if it was possible. Meanwhile, the agencies went about the regulatory work of getting such a system funded and executed, no easy process given the added layers posed by the Army Corps and FEMA. “We’ve had to submit things two and three times,” Sea Box’s Begley said. “We work with government a lot, so we know what it’s like, and it’s nobody’s fault. You get these commanders who come through for six months, and when they move on, you may have to start again. It’s just how the bureaucracy works.” On the city side of things, everything had to be debated: Should there be fire sprinklers? Should it be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act? What if it violates the zoning code, with the construction of a building larger than zoning would allow, which seems certain if a five- or six-story building
was assembled on a parking lot near the beach in, say, Queens or Staten Island, where zoning calls almost exclusively for low-lying single-family homes. “There are certain codes for temporary structures, and certain codes for permanent structures, but this is really neither, so what do you do with it?” Burney said. “Exceptions have to be made, and figuring those out with all the agencies takes time.” Time has even been spent on figuring out if and how to decorate the containers. They could be painted different colors, creating interesting patterns, an inviting kaleidoscope of corrugated steel. Decals or designs could be added to the exteriors, as well, creating makeshift murals. “We want these to be an attractive place to live, to help foster community,” Pawlowski said. The city has worked closely with Sea Box on the project, but it has not yet given the final goahead to the firm’s plan, which would involve producing about 15,000 units, dispersed around the country in clusters of 500 to 1,000 units. The way Sea Box sees it, the units would sit in a lot somewhere until they are needed, be that in New York or Los Angeles or Minneapolis or Sioux Falls, S.D. “An ISO container will last 35 years, and you can reuse it 20 times,” Begley said. “The old FEMA trailers, tie them up for a year or two and they’re through.” Those 15,000 units would supply the city for a month or two while production ramped up if more were needed—the city expects to work with numerous contractors to produce these units. Following the program, they would be broken down, retrofitted and put back into storage for the next disaster. While the program has been built with New Yorkers in mind, City Hall believes it could serve as yet another model for cities around the country, just like the smoking ban has. “We’ve created a universal specification of what we believed anyone in the container industry could use,” Bruno said. “It works in New York City, but it could probably work anywhere, so it has national implications.” If only it had been ready a year ago. “Certainly I would have liked to have seen it happen sooner, but that’s just the process,” Burney said. “As the mayor keeps saying, this isn’t going to be the last storm we see.”
Nov. 29-Dec. 5, 2012
21, and he, along with some colleagues from OEM and the group Architecture for Humanity, had come to debate the all-too-prescient topic “After Disaster: How Does NYC Plan to Recover?” Less than a week later, Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be standing inside OEM headquarters, imploring nearly 300,000 New Yorkers to evacuate low-lying areas. “The idea is that by providing temporary long-term housing, we can provide a pathway to the recovery of the neighborhood,” Pawlowski explained to the audience. “Probably the most important thing for a neighborhood to come back is that the people are there to rebuild it.” Six years ago, Pawlowski helped launch an initiative to find an alternative to FEMA trailers, which weren’t built with New York City’s density in
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would cover most, if not all of the costs, and the agency would also have the units at its disposal across the country, if it chooses. FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are tentatively onboard. To test its plan, the city is already preparing to build a 16-unit prototype in the Office of Emergency Management’s backyard, on a plot of land behind headquarters at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Four units wide and four units high, the complex would show that the system is both structurally and socially sound. It turns out that Hurricane Sandy, the very occasion when these units could have best been put to the test, actually interrupted their development. OEM, having secured $1 million in seed money from City Hall last year, was in the middle of drafting a public request for firms to build a prototype when the superstorm popped up on the radar. All resources have been dedicated to Sandy ever since. Even so, the administration still plans to have a prototype deployed by the second half of next year—and if anything, Sandy has made that goal more urgent, not less. “It’s not the whole solution to a housing-recovery program, but it’s a piece of it,” OEM Commissioner Joseph Bruno said. “It’s a good piece, too, one of the options that allows you to rebuild in a community that was devastated. You keep people in their neighborhood, and you don’t worry about losing them from your city.” The ability to stack the units creates a level of density that is inherently, and necessarily, New York. In Galveston, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; or Wilmington, N.C., FEMA would just roll its trailers into front yards and driveways. In New York, how many people do you know with a front yard? “We’re not just restoring somebody’s apartment, we’re restoring somebody’s street,” Thaddeus Pawlowski, an urban planner at the Department of City Planning, said during a recent lecture about the city’s disaster housing program at the Center for Architecture. “New Yorkers love their streets. They love their neighborhoods. So it’s very important people feel connected again to their neighborhood.” Pawlowski was actually delivering his remarks exactly one week before Sandy hit the city. It was the night of Oct.