Innovative Passage Designs for Syrian Refugees

Escalating tensions in Syria have caused a dramatic increase in the number of residents leaving their home country and seeking refugee status. There are currently 13.5 million Syrians who need some form of assistance, and a respectable amount of those people are attempting to find safe-havens wherever they can. Many of them try to immigrate to nearby countries to escape the civil war; yet, in their attempts to escape, they will be met with extremely harsh weather conditions and nearly inaccessible routes. Clearly, there is a desperate need for innovative ways to effectively and efficiently deal with this influx of people entering areas that are not landlocked, like Italy, Spain, Greece, and Malta. Thankfully, Spiros Koulias of 360 Architects, in the latest twist of innovative (and humanitarian) designs, has developed a large-scale building model carved into a steep coastal cliff that would host refugees and migrants at entry points and passages.
These 22-story structures offer temporary accommodations for the refugees and enable authorities to document who crosses the border. The designs themselves are made to offer ease of transport by building through the steep rocky cliffs of the seas, as you can see in the model below.

In terms of design for this specific unit, there is a repetitive structure within each floor, and they stretch from water level, all the way to the top of the cliff. Interestingly enough, the design actually has almost 80% of the structure settled inside the rock.

Spiros says that “The specific example of the building that was applied in this study, developed in a total of 22 floors while the total number of people that can accommodate each unit is about 500-600 people.”

Considering that thousands of Syrians are fleeing the country each day, these forms of innovative designs can drastically help in managing the refugees populations whereabouts and making their long journeys a bit less daunting.