The Roll-Out House

Deborah Gans is Principal of Deborah Gans Studio and a professor at Pratt Institute and Yale University.  She’s best known for her “extreme housing”, design prototypes for people displaced by homelessness, natural disaster, or war.  Gans Studio’s Roll-Out House was recently featured in Into the Open, the 2008 Venice Biennale exhibition that explores the ways architects are collaborating to foster civic engagement and build better communities.

When Into the Open came to Philadelphia this summer, the Collaborative spoke with Gans about her work, building a practice, and her role in planning the exhibition.

Gans Studio designs furniture, exhibitions, and private residences as well as extreme housing. Why do you take on such a wide range of  projects?
I see no contradiction between practicing for typical clients and underserved clients.  Designing for the underserved is where change, energy, and evolution reside.  I like to talk about things as part of a continuum.  By taking on the more extreme projects, you learn lessons you can use for everyday conditions.

Tell us about the project you presented in Into the Open.
The Roll-Out House was originally a response to a 1999 design competition to provide basic shelter for the 250,000 people displaced in Kosovo.  The competition’s RFP essentially charged the designer to ‘do a better tent.’  It left no options for a better system of operation for the refugee camp.  Yet access to water and power has all sorts of implications—independence, portability, the sharing of resources.

In refugee camps, the primary clients are women and children.  Without an independent source of water and fuel, they are forced to venture further out, spending time away from their children and exposing themselves to the risk of rape or disease.  The Roll-Out House is designed to collect rainwater and solar energy in the columns that support it.  I like to call this approach ‘domesticating infrastructure’.

The Roll-Out House is not actually a house, it’s a tool to be built around.  The structure has a hearth and home, but leaves personalization up to the resident.  The house also becomes portable.  If you could go home, you could take it with you and put it inside your existing home or on your property while you rebuild.  Within the refugee camp, the flexibility of the unit allows families or communities to cluster or create social spaces like a soccer field or a cistern.

For Into the Open, I adapted the Roll-Out House for the Lakota tribe at the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, using straw bale construction. I was struck by the parallels with the conditions I encountered in Kosovo: No housing, no infrastructure, uranium-poisoned water… the worst land where agriculture and other self-sustaining activities are not possible.

What’s your advice on building a design practice?
Create your own practice… don’t take everything that comes through the door.  Enter competitions, but choose ones that frame your interests.  If you’re lucky, 1 in 10 will lead to something more– maybe a few prize dollars or a commission.

Always go for your real client.  If you don’t design for the primary user, you’re not going to understand the creative opportunities of the situation .

Describe the process of planning Into the Open.
There were lots of arguments while putting the exhibit together—productive ones, but quite serious.  The debate focused on two main conflicts: architecture as a social form versus a physical form, and architecture as bottom-up process versus a top-down process.  In the end, though, nobody wanted to apologize for physical form, they wanted to submit something beautiful.

Deborah Gans not only works with a wide range of clients. She also combines elements of architectural, urban, and industrial design in her work. Other projects by Deborah Gans Studio:
Desk of the Future:
A desk design prototype for the School Authority of New York that addressed the students’ need to “graze among media” and have a space to call their own despite overcrowded schools and housing.

First Step Housing
A design prototype for rooming units in an SRO in The Bowery that allowed homeless men to control their immediate environment and level of privacy.

New Orleans East
A neighborhood master plan that leveraged close family networks to support shared stormwater management through a system of backyard swales and mini-wetlands.