Temporary shelters – an experience on Santos beach Cristina Ibrahim Ribas, Maria Valéria Affonso dos Santos, Maria Valquíria de Souza Barbosa

Abstract

The text describes the innovative approach adopted by three professors of the Architectural Design I course at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade Santa Cecília de Santos in 2012. The course, which consists of 640 hours of classes over the five years of the course, presents a great challenge in the first semester, when students do not yet have drawing skills and have difficulty in starting architectural projects. To overcome this challenge, the Architectural Design I course proposed the development of a project for a Temporary Shelter that could be assembled and installed on the beach of Santos. The project was divided into 11 stages, from the lecture on relevant architectural projects and volumetry, to the disassembly and final cleaning of the area chosen for the installation of the shelters on the sandy strip of the beach. Activities include project planning, bibliographical study of different ways of living in different periods of historiography, making models from scrap materials, transforming these models into a proposal for temporary shelter, preparing technical drawings, making the final model, and implementing and assembling the shelters for use for one night/early morning. During the process, students learned essential concepts such as dimensioning, graphic representation, the relationship between form and function, as well as basic notions of urban planning. The emphasis on volumetry and the visit to the Santos Scout group contributed to the development of the projects. The final stage involved assembling the shelters on the beach, where the groups faced logistical challenges and were able to experience the diversity of materials and ways of designing a shelter. After one night/early morning of use, the shelters were dismantled and the area was cleaned, providing students with a practical and complete experience. The text highlights the importance of this innovative approach in teaching the subject of Architectural Design.