Designing homes for the homeless, displaced

A person takes a picture in front of a set of images of migrants on boats displayed at a current show at the Museum of Modern Art. [Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]

Exhibit examines shelter from the vantage point of shelter for refugees.

When it comes to the design of homes and interiors, ideas can have surprising origins.

The origins of Modernism's spare functionalism can be traced to housing solutions created to solve Europe's severe housing crisis in the aftermath of World War I. And once-radical concepts like open flow plans, Pyrex glassware and linoleum flooring were initially designed for corporate or industrial settings.

A contemporary example of that flow of ideas from crisis to general use is Pritzker Architecture Prize recipient Shigeru Ban's use of thick paper tubes in the quick and efficient construction of temporary housing for disaster victims. The tubes have also been employed by Ban to build innovative museums, churches and other structures around the world.

In the other direction, IKEA's expertise in inexpensive flat-packed furniture has been applied to shelters, which can be rapidly and cheaply transported around the world and assembled - and disassembled - within a matter of hours.

A new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art invites visitors to take an entirely new look at the concept of home and design, this time through the lens of migration and global refugee emergencies, in which temporary shelters, organizers say, are being deployed on a scale akin to that after World War I.

The exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter, on view through Jan. 22, brings together both artists' ideas of home and what it represents and also a range of designs of shelters and refugee settlements.

"These shelters and camps are, in reality quasi-permanent," says Sean Anderson, associate curator in MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design, who organized the show with Ariele Dionne-Krosnick. Shelters are de facto homes to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, Anderson points out, and the average time a displaced person remains in such a situation is over 20 years - longer than many people remain in one home.