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Climate Caravan
Studio Work with Paul Meuser 
Fall 2021
Heather Roberge & Daisy Ames

Given the studio premise, with climate change the rise in the land value gets even more significant as the inhabitable land on Earth decreases as climate refugees seek new territories. Housing as an asset cannot expect to grow in comparison to land value1, thus the proposed housing system fosters value and ownership through a physical engagement with the reconfigurable elements of the house, and its connection to the community around it. By customizing the components of the house according to one’s lifestyle, the architecture operates as a system of furniture2, inspiring people to transform their houses while becoming expressi- ve of the inhabitants living in it. Additionally this housing system seeks to provide housing for multi-generational households, and non-nuclear family structures. Starting the journey in Los Angeles, the project extends over temporality on land occupation.

1 As of now 75% of Angelenos rent housing at a cost exceeding 30% of their household income.


2 With the notions of prefab, our proposal fulfills both the immediate needs of its new inhabitants seeking refuge and challenges traditional notions of ownership and private versus public domain.



Each house is composed of 4 post-and-beam steel components: kitchen-bath- room unit, private unit, public unit and patio unit. Adequately sized and private kitchen bathroom units act as the anchor points for all house configurations while its timely position in the system separate it as the box of renewable service space.


The project exists in 3 different scale of urbanism starting with a 50’ x 150’ generic R1 site in LA. R2 enabled hosting more house configuations. For R3, 3 different community typologies are developed: The Maze, The Path and The Plaza.

The Maze allows for more obscured boundaries between the houses where neighbors create an open courtyard together with common spaces are in close contact within. 




The Path establishes a more defined contact with its environment while opening to a public park, and have the capacity to house larger families with two sets of houses. Common spaces of the second type act as a corridor node with the adjacent ‘path’ village allowing for bigger gatherings as well as richer interactions and exchanges across villages.




The Plaza is the most descriptive of all with all houses looking inward for a public open area, and the village opens up in the middle for general activities. Common spaces of the last type are catalyzers for a well defined open space to provide a common courtyard in the village protected from the external dynamics.


The final design of 68 acre Burbank site incorporated the construction strategy to set up the different types of villages accordingly. A total of approximately 4250 cars must be recycled to produce—5 cars equivalent to 1 full house— the whole post and beam structure for 850 houses on the site. This embedded steel-to-house relationship of the project sensitizes the inhabitant with the steel-carbon matrics of the global scale. The steel hardware of the system becomes tectonically stable giving inhabitants the authority during both the reconfiguration of the house and the transportation of the house during migration.
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