The Neville Walton Travel Award Jamie Voros (MM, 2010-12)
Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
epal is a beautifully remote country, many thousands of metres above sea level. My ears did not pop as the plane came into land on one of the world’s shortest commercial runways in Kathmandu. At 14,000 feet up we were almost landing in the clouds. The mountainous beauty promised by the view from the plane was striking, particularly given that just one year before my visit, Nepal had been rocked by a series of devastating earthquakes. Many families were displaced initially, and one year on many still did not have access to proper shelter. I jumped to the conclusion that so many people were experiencing serious problems with housing this far on because shelter design appropriate for the climate and lack of materials must have been major hurdles. Nepal’s lack of housing in the wake of its earthquakes sounded solvable through intelligent design and engineering. These ideas gave rise to the topic of my bachelor’s thesis: a transitional shelter for Nepalese earthquake victims. Transitional shelters are a form of rapidly buildable housing that displaced people can live in until they are able to find permanent housing. Typically, a transitional shelter is designed specifically for a certain disaster or population. After nine months of design iterations, running simulations and reaching out to anyone familiar with Nepalese culture I produced my own transitional shelter design. ➽
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