4.365
Advanced Visual Design—The FEMA Trailer Project
Instructor: Jae Rhim Lee
Office: N52-337
Telephone:617-254-3855
jrlee@mit.edu
M, 12:30-3:30pm, N52-342 (recitation)
M, 7-9pm, N51-337 (lecture series)
Unit credits: 3-3-6
Level H
HASS-E credits available by arrangement
FEMA Trailers** have come to symbolize many of the environmental, social, economic, and administrative challenges associated with temporary disaster housing.
Students in the FEMA Trailer Project Course will explore the historical, artistic, political, and environmental issues applicable to surplus FEMA Trailers, execute mini-projects using the existing trailer at MIT, and develop a formal proposal (in groups) for the final transformation of the trailer. The MIT FEMA Trailer will undergo transformation beginning January 2009.
Students may also use their class work as part of a project submitted for the MIT FEMA Trailer Challenge, a competition held in conjunction with the MIT Public Service Center that will be launched in Fall ’08, with final projects due in January 2009.
**FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) purchased approximately 145,000 travel trailers to house those displaced by Hurricane Katrina beginning in Fall 2005. Since their deployment, the trailers have been tied to a host of issues, including formaldehyde off-gassing (at the center of a class-action lawsuit against FEMA and trailer manufacturers), surplus trailers currently sitting in paid parking lots across the country, mental health problems in trailer parks, the lack of affordable housing in many regions of the Gulf Coast, etc.
FIRST CLASS: September 8, 2008, 12:30-3:30pm, N52-342* (no evening lecture series)
**As part of the first class artist Marguerite Kahrl will give discuss her current work with mesh networks and radiation zones. Marguerite is a practicing permaculturist and scientist-artist based in Turino, Italy, New York, and Maine. For more information, visit http://www.kahrl.com/**
