“Building in a Bag,” Concrete Canvas Shelter

In a world with millions of refugees, numerous war zones and huge areas devastated by natural disaster, aid agencies have long needed a way to quickly erect shelters on demand.This Concrete Canvas Shelter is intended to improve upon two current methods of providing emergency shelter.

Concrete Canvas Shelters are rapidly deployable hardened shelters that require only water and air for construction. The 25sqm variant can be deployed by 2 people without any training in under an hour and is ready to use in only 24 hours.

The key to CCS is the use of inflation to create a surface that is optimised for compressive loading. This allows thin walled concrete structures to be formed which are both robust and lightweight. CCS consist of a cement impregnated fabric (Concrete Cloth) bonded to the outer surface of a plastic inner which forms a Nissen-Hut shaped structure once inflated.

Concrete Canvas Shelters (CCS) have major advantages over conventional tented shelter:

1) Operational: CCS enables a hardened structure from day one of a crisis. It provides much better environmental protection, increased security and vastly improved medical capability.

2) Financial: CCS has a design life of over 10 years, whereas tents survive for only a few years and must then be replaced. CCS is a one stop solution, saving effort and cost over the lifetime of medium to long term operations.

Concrete Canvas Shelter