The Amazing Hexayurt

Justin Ruckman
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Hexayurt is an autonomous shelter and family support system, based on open-source designs, comprised of inexpensive, readily available materials, and complete with infrastructure for water purification, composting toilets, fuel-efficient stoves and solar electric lighting. The shelter alone ranges from $100 to $300 depending on size, and the infrastructure package works out to around $100 per adult.

Units take three people about an hour to assemble without any heavy lifting, ladders or scaffolding.

Hexayurt initially demoed at Burning Man in 2003. The reflective material used in construction keeps the unit habitable in even the harsh desert environment of Black Rock City, providing for a cool place to sleep at night and a comfortable refuge in the afternoon. Since then, the designs have undergone extensive prototyping and field testing, and are now ready for mass production. In the event of disaster the plans could be used to produce one million units in three days at an estimated cost of under $7 hundred million, putting the cost per head at $120.

Check out the project's website and wiki for extensive information regarding construction, infrastructure, and deployment in festive gatherings and disasters alike.

 

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Hexayurt one-page overview PDF629.33 KB

Comments

this is a fine idea -

Submitted by warren on Thu, 09/06/2007 - 19:20.
this is a fine idea - however - i've used the dow foam board and even with the foil face it loads with water and will fall from its own weight. might be ok for a short time, or if it was sprayed with grancrete before the first heavy rain. it's also probably going to off gas formaldahyde unless dow has changed the boards chemical make up recently. i just don't see it lasting for 20 years as claimed.

Board durability

Submitted by hexayurt on Fri, 09/07/2007 - 09:58.
Hi, Warren. Yes, the consumer grade of the Dow boards certainly won't last 20 years anywhere. Well, just possibly in a rainless desert, but nowhere realistic. However, there are much, much heavier grades - Thermax HD for instance - which are rated for use in exposed locations. Now, there are also questions that we are only going to be able to answer by testing about use of those boards in long term structural applications - nobody has ever done it, so there's some experimentation to be done. However, hexacomb cardboard, the other board material we recommend, was used for permanent building applications in the State of California in the 1980s and is extremely durable when paired with the correct facing materials. We are overhauling the web site materials in the next few weeks to make a lot of this stuff much clearer - to divide up the stuff so it's easier to tell what's relevant to Burning Man, what's more relevant to refugees, and so on. Thanks for the comments, though - it's a good point.