The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in 2023 was their call to action. A group of students with ties to Turkey designed a house that can withstand an earthquake. Now, it’s ready for transport.
The ART team: Elif Ezgi Sevindik, Elif Ceylan-Turkmen, Hatice Görgülüoğlu, Meriç Kessaf, Leyla van der Waarde and Didem Yonter Kuyu. (Photo: Jos Wassink)
On the way to the press presentation of the prototype, the first reports of a major earthquake in Myanmar come over the radio. Not again, surely? With a magnitude of 7.7 on the Richter scale, it is almost as powerful as the earthquake that hit the Turkish region of Hayat and the city of Antakya two years ago.
TU Delft student Meriç Kessaf knows that the region her family comes from gets struck by an earthquake every 100 to 200 years. After completing her bachelor’s degree in Earth Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, she decided to switch to architecture at TU Delft in 2020, with the goal of designing houses that could withstand such inevitable earthquakes.
Just a month after the earthquake in Turkey on 6 February 2023, several student teams presented designs for earthquake-resistant buildings at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE). The final design was completed by the end of the year. Meriç Kessaf, Leyla van der Waarde, Hena Micoogullari van Alphen, and others joined forces in the Architectural Recovery Team (ART) and announced their plan to actually build their design. And now, it’s done. At the end of March, the team unveiled the prototype at a press event in a hall at the construction company Dura Vermeer in Dordrecht.
Village Home with Expansion Options
Dressed in work boots, high-visibility vests, and yellow safety helmets, a dozen journalists follow the students to the far end of a huge hall, where a rectangular residential block stands in the corner. In short presentations, team members and TU Delft lecturer Job Schroën, who has guided the project from the start, explain the design.
Kessaf and Van der Waarde, the initiators, explain that after the earthquake, most media attention concentrated on the city of Antakya in southeastern Turkey. The villages, where many city dwellers fled to, remained largely out of sight. This is why the students decided to design a village home.
Elif Ceylan-Turkmen, the project manager, adds that they first listened to the people on the ground. From those conversations, the idea emerged to design a central section of the house containing a kitchen, bathroom, and technical space. Local builders can then add extra rooms as needed.
The team chose cross-laminated timber (CLT), which has several advantages, as the construction material. The 10 centimetre thick plywood is relatively lightweight, easy to process in a factory, has a negative CO₂ footprint, offers good thermal insulation, and is fully recyclable. The panels are fastened together with long screws, often at different angles. The bathroom is finished with waterproof sandwich panels that provide extra insulation. On the roof, six 200 watt peak solar panels supply the house with energy.
Visibly proud, the students show off their creation, pointing to the red lifting eyes that will be used to hoist the four tonne house for shipping to Turkey. In addition to crowdfunding, around 10 sponsors helped finance the project. For the students involved, it was entirely voluntary work. The total cost of the house is estimated at EUR 25,000 – just EUR 10,000 more than an uncomfortable shipping container, which is currently being used as emergency housing.
Urgent Need for Emergency Housing
As inspiring as this project is, it also has its limitations. For example, the students weren’t able to subject the house to an actual earthquake test on a shake table. It’s also not yet clear whether or how the prototype will go into mass production. The students hope that aid organisations might play a role here because, unfortunately, the demand for emergency housing is widespread, urgent and immense.
- Follow the house’s journey to Turkey via ART’s website or their social media channels.
- Find out more about extreme architecture here.
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j.w.wassink@tudelft.nl
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