Project Blog

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This week in class, we were finishing up our disaster proof housing project. We had to choose a natural disaster and a place that suffered from it often, and then we had to design and build a model of a house that could withstand the disaster. Once we turned them in, we would test them, and the tests have very interesting results. My group chose to do flooding in Bangladesh, and I learned that Bangladesh is very close to sea level, meaning that a small storm with lots of rain could flood the area. We had to use materials that were native to our chosen area to plan out the original house that we would build, and we had to write up what we were replacing and what we were replacing it with. Our original design was very interesting. I learned that Bangladesh has lots of iron, which surprised me. I always thought of Bangladesh as a poorer country and that they didn’t have too many house building materials. Not surprising, they have wood, mud and grass, so our original house in real life would be a wooden hut plastered with a mud-and-grass mixture and coated in iron to keep out the water. It would be placed on stilts with a set of steps to get up. Our prototype had wooden walls, was placed on short stilts, and was covered in clean, white duct tape to keep out the water. When we went to test it, our teacher put it in a big plastic tub and poured a big bucket of water over it. Our house successfully kept out all water, but there was one major failure. Our house was not on the bottom of the tub. It was floating on the surface of the water, bobbing around and floating around the tub. I did learn that the house was far too light to stay on the bottom. My group and I were all very sure that in real life, the house would be strong enough to stay on the ground, but we definitely learned to make sure that it was heavy enough to pass the test. 

Backward-looking

-What problems did you encounter while working on this piece? How did you solve them?

When my group and I were working on the house, we came across the fact that we didn’t have our materials. The house was due soon, and we had a lot of things to make the interior furnishings like hot glue, popsicle sticks, duct tape and paint, but we didn’t have the wood to build the house. We were freaking out a little bit, but we finally solved the problem by taking a visit to the Maker Lab and taking some wood from there. We were able to draw out the blueprint on it, and when we met up over the weekend before testing, we were able to get it done.

Inward-looking

-What was particularly satisfying to you about either the process or the piece of work?

I liked how clean our house looked when it was done. We had covered it in shiny, clean white duct tape, which looked very nice and felt incredibly satisfying to me. I also liked (for some odd reason) how the house was floating on the top of the water. That was the reason that we failed, but it felt very happy and satisfying to me.

Outward-looking

-What grade would you give it? Why?

I would give this house a C. I decided on a C because the house didn’t have any water inside of it, which was the major part of it, but the house was not heavy enough to stay on the bottom of the tub and was floating on the top. The house was supposed to stay secured on the bottom and not move from its original position. Ours sadly did, but the major part of not letting the water in succeeded.

Forward-looking

-What's the one thing that you have seen in your classmates' work or process that you would like to try in your next piece?

I saw in multiple of my classmate's houses that they had put on a slanted roof. The water rolled off of their roofs, making their whole house dry inside. They had coated the roof also in duct tape, which helped.