Building structures in Calais refugee camp

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term

Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration

Series convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design.

The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review on Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker

Grainne Hassett is a practising architect, Senior Lecturer and member of the Advisory Board at the new School of Architecture, University of Limerick (SAUL). She regularly reviews work in other Irish Architecture Schools and has reviewed work at Yokohama, Turin, Stockholm and Strathclyde Schools of Architecture.

Her practice, Hassett Ducatez Architects is committed to a close connection between architecture and its own research. As architectural thinking advances through its negotiation of the architectural project within society, with technology, art, law, financial instruments and other myriad strategies, this practice is the field of her research. The work has received the Downes Medal for Architectural Excellence, 11 prestigious architectural awards in Ireland, been nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe prize and the UK YAYA prize, and has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale amongst other featured, lectured, published, or exhibited scenarios nationally and internationally.

In 2010 she published ‘The Necessary Contract’, a reflection on the practice of two architects and two artists arising out of the Kevin Kieran Irish Arts Council OPW Bursary for Research in Architecture. This is a significant two-part research award; the second part is a directly commissioned public building by the Irish State.