Temporary tents, student residences. . . ICU. Two-bed prototype for a fraction of the cost of features being built in coronavirus-battered Italy
Architects have turned to shipping boxes to create everything from pop-up department stores to coworking spaces and wobbly student housing towers. But now the humble corrugated metal box has found perhaps one of its most useful reincarnations yet, in the hands of a foreign network of architects and engineers who banded together to turn them into two-bed intensive care suites for the coronavirus pandemic. “All of us started talking about a week ago, wondering how our skills can contribute to this emergency,” says Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect based in Boston, where he teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We know that there is a great need for comprehensive care systems around the world, but there are problems with the two existing responses, as revealed by an official report from the Chinese government, uncovered in its experience with the virus. ” An existing solution, he says, is to take a conference center and fill it with many beds, creating a box hospital overnight, as is currently planned for the ExCel center in east London. There is power in numbers, however, the Chinese government found that the disorders were caused by the intense concentration of infected air, with the result that many more medical personnel were infected. The current solution consists of prefabricated hospitals, equipped with all the mechanical ventilation and negative tension systems necessary for biocontainment, but which take several months to build. A field hospital, set up in a few hours or a few days”, explains Ratti, “but at the same time having something like a prefabricated hospital?
Their solution is Cura (Connected Units for Respiratory Illness), a plan to pack the entire service of an intensive care unit, complete with exhaust fans to create negative air pressure, inside a shipping container. 20 feet, capable of being transported anywhere and deployed in just a few hours. In collaboration with architect Italo Rota, Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan Polytechnic, Jacobs engineers, and an organization of leading European doctors and experts in emergency management, Ratti secured investment from UniCredit to scale up the first prototype, which was is manufacturing in Turin. He will be sent to a hospital in Milan, one of the epicenters of the pandemic. The designs are meant to be open source blueprints online, and the team hopes they’ll be copied around the world. They are talking to several automakers that could mass-produce the games. “The key is how easy you can move those modules around,” Ratti explains. “Surges of the virus are spreading so temporarily in other regions, so we want to be able to deploy broad packages of care where they are needed most. The merit of the shipping container is that the infrastructure already exists to move them. “The pods were designed to function as stand-alone arrays, or they can be connected via an inflatable walkway design to create larger multi-bed clusters. Ratti envisions the arrays being installed throughout existing hospitals, supporting masses of parking and the rest spaces, or deployed as stand-alone box hospitals He estimates that each two-bed pod can be produced for around $100,000, adding all the medical equipment, or about a third of the pre-bed charge of a prefabricated emergency hospital.