Just a Minute – A deployable bamboo emergency shelter for the Nepal earthquake

On 25 April 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated Nepal: nearly 9,000 victims, over 600,000 homes destroyed, entire rural communities forced to live in tents for months. It is against this backdrop that Just a Minute was conceived, a project by Barberio Colella Architetti for an emergency home designed to be quick to assemble, economical, durable and, above all, capable of meeting the real needs of Nepalese families: space for four to ten people, local or regional materials, energy self-sufficiency and adaptability to the country’s diverse climates, from the Terai plains to the Himalayan highlands.

The core concept is a fold-out structure. When closed, the house occupies an area of 2.5×4 metres, compact enough to be transported on a standard vehicle to the destination site. Once on site, the building envelope unfolds around a permanent core made of OSB panels (1.5×4 metres), which houses the facilities: a bathroom with a chemical toilet, shower, aluminium washbasin, electric hob and a 30-litre water tank. The structure thus measures 4×7.11 metres, with two side rooms (a living area and a sleeping area) and a small covered outdoor area measuring 1×4 metres.

The load‑bearing structure consists of 60 mm diameter bamboo poles (uprights, cross-beams and roof beams), braced with 30 mm diameter bamboo poles arranged in St Andrew’s crosses. The poles are drilled in the centre and at the ends to allow the frame to unfold; once open, the system is secured with wing nuts. The building envelope consists of a double-layer jute canvas with a layer of recycled wool padding in between (made from clothes and jumpers donated through charity campaigns) which provides thermal insulation against both heat and cold. An external waterproof membrane, stretched away from the jute using spacers, protects against rain and snow whilst allowing the interior spaces to breathe. The short facades are made of polycarbonate mounted on a bamboo frame, with small additional panels of bamboo canes that function as reversible solar shading devices (removable in winter, repositionable in summer).

The single-pitch roof is designed to accommodate solar and photovoltaic panels, making the unit energy self-sufficient. Rainwater is collected from the roof and channelled into the central core for reuse. The true value of the project, however, lies in its social dimension: the units are designed to be grouped together (twin houses, four-unit houses, small villages) recreating the community fabric shattered by the earthquake. Fabrication requires neither complex technologies nor skilled labour: the process can be organised like an assembly line (one team prepares the bamboo modules, another the OSB core, another the textile building envelope), and parts of the components can be prefabricated off-site to further speed up assembly. Just a Minute is not designer architecture: it is an infrastructure for community reconstruction.