Tiny architectures. Light constructive strategies for dwelling nomad

Today’s world is affected by an intense flow of migration forcing us to dwell on topics such as the living and the contemporary meaning of building. This is an effect of the latest and ongoing dramatic military facts and natural disaster. People from different countries, finding shelter in temporary emergency settlements, are subjects to epochal migrations and they represent a major issue in conceiving housing dynamics. All this will affect architecture and change its approach. On one hand, life in an emergency shelter lets migrating people hope to go back, perceiving the transitory nature of the settlement; on the other, settlements should feel permanent, eager to express the familiar and comfortable lifestyle of their everyday life. The international study case analysis, realised in difficult situations, can be recognised for its architectural qualities and respond to the social, economic and environmental sustainability standards. This contribution wants to identify building and intervention strategies able to adapt to the unstable mutations of migrating people’s needs. The small ‘infrastructures’ for the migration emergency, also known as tiny architectures, can promptly adapt to these people’s needs. They have been displaced and eradicated from their countries and their cultures, and the minute constructions aim at expressing new forms of integration to respond to man’s primary need to inhabit a place and to requalify the abandoned edging areas. The tiny architectures, actual spatial solutions made of various materials and experimental combinable standard modular structures, are realised with simple technological systems and low cost materials. They are ready to be dismantled and ‘reinterpreted’ to set up an indefinite natural and anthropic ‘flowing’ space and they will affect the architectural project approach in the upcoming years. The small scale of the ‘emergency’ abode represents a concrete occasion for architectural research and experimentation, inducing to update the housing dynamics mindset. That would also stimulate a project re-writing oriented towards a new living code.