Disaster zone solutions on show at Scott Sutherland School

Architectural designs created by a group of Australian students in response to the country's flooding disaster will be on display at Aberdeen's Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment next week.

The exhibition is a product of the student society, ‘Tesseract', which was founded to promote humanitarian design issues after a group of architecture students went to India to design a school last summer.

The society runs monthly design competitions online, and has received scores of entries from students around the world. Last month's brief was to design a humanitarian solution responding to the current flooding disasters around the globe. As a result the students were contacted by Glenda Caldwell, an architecture lecturer from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, who wanted to run the brief as a university project for her students. This led to 160 fourth year students working together in groups of four, each presenting their own solution to the problem. A selection of these will be exhibited in the old hall of the Scott Sutherland School building from 22 - 25 March.

Glenda said: "The students from QUT are extremely excited to have the occasion to participate in Tesseract's competition as part of their assessment. This is an incredible opportunity for them; it's not every day these students have global exposure of their work, or have the chance to voice their response to such a disaster through design."

Third year architecture student, Anna Grill (23), is one of the co-ordinators of the exhibition. She said, "We are really excited about this; it's an amazing opportunity to connect students around the world to humanitarian issues, and encourage students as future architects to take on a role of responding to these disasters.

"It also gives the Australian students a voice and opportunity to share what they have experienced. It will, of course, be very interesting to see the solutions devised by those who have actually been affected by events that can seem so remote to us."

Anna, who is from Stockholm, Sweden, was part of a group of students who went to Delhi last summer to design a new school and women's shelter for the charity Anusaran. Since then the group have remained in contact with the charity with a view to taking their designs forward.

The exhibition will be open at the Scott Sutherland School on Garthdee Road from Tuesday 22 - Friday 25 March from 9am - 6pm.

For further information please visit: http://tesseractproject.wordpress.com/

There will be an opportunity to photograph Anna and the Tesseract team with some of the exhibits in the Scott Sutherland School on Friday 18 March at 1pm.

Members of the media should meet Andrew Youngson at the main school reception on arrival.

Design example captions:

QRBT: Quick Response Balloon Transport - Designing with the sole purpose of quick response techniques to save lives. The proposal suggests a balloon, which inflates rapidly, much like an airbag in a car. The balloon is fuelled by a small burner, and pre-packed with emergency stock of foods and medicine.

Sleeves Of Salvation: Temporary sleeves attached through suction cup system between windows for quick escape to rescue site.

Pauline Smith
Communications Officer
Robert Gordon University
Schoolhill
Aberdeen
AB10 1FR
Tel: 01224 262389
Email: p.smith1@rgu.ac.uk

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