A bursary-funded project to design and build refugee shelters on the Thailand-Burma border.

The statistics are starkly brutal: 170,000 refugees living in nine camps along the western Thai border, fleeing the Burmese military junta in what is one of the longest-running civil wars in recent decades. Julia King and Asif Khan’s One Year House project is based at the MaeLa camp, which provides uneasy sanctuary for 50,000 Burmese, half of them children. They’re reasonably well treated by the authorities, but the supply of food and shelter depends solely on humanitarian aid agencies. If that were not problematic enough, there’s also a Catch-22. The Thai government does not allow the construction of permanent buildings in these camps, and other official restrictions exacerbate a camp culture described by King and Khan as ‘one of dependency rather than development.’ Their field research, carried out in 2006, drew on a network of organisations and individuals to identify shortcomings in the camp’s housing. This produced a set of needs: effective seasonal temperature regulation in the huts; increased ventilation that did not also increase mosquito activity; better internal illumination; dealing with material shortfalls by finding ways to extend the life of bamboo and eucalyptus structural sections.

First, King and Khan established a relationship with the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), sole providers of shelter materials for the refugee camps; then they opened discussions with refugee camp leaders, carpenters and other MaeLa occupants. Their relationship with the carpenters, in particular, proved crucial in developing new structural jointing systems that, despite being necessarily ‘temporary’ to meet government regulations, were strong, flexible and versatile. Supported by the TBBC, the collaboration led to an intensive two-week study of potential building systems in MaeLa. This then produced a prototype refugee hut to test not only the novel jointing system – developed in detail in London – but the building’s overall environmental performance. The key new developments were a flexible structural jointing system, developed by King and Khan, and an articulated roof ridge detail. Environmental assessments included lighting analysis tests on the roof system. Significantly, the in-camp material test, and the development of new tools, were carried out by the local carpenters, whose findings were then fed back into the design development process. The project, whose benefits may eventually spread to other Thai border refugee camps, was awarded follow-up funding by the British Council.