An Off-Grid "Quarantine Cabin" Near Barcelona Harvests Sunlight and Rainwater
Designed and built by a group of students in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Voxel allows its residents to operate self-sufficiently for 14 days.
Designed and built by a group of students in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Voxel allows its residents to operate self-sufficiently for 14 days.
Tucked away in the Spain’s Parc de Collserola, a secluded nature area just outside of Barcelona, a striking wood-and-glass structure known as the Voxel is made of materials primarily culled from its site. The small-but-functional space was recently completed by a team of students and researchers at the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia’s (IAAC) Valldaura Labs, as part of the Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities (MAEBB) program.
The Voxel sits in Spain’s Collserola natural park near the Valldaura Labs research campus, where IAAC students focus on designing and building self-sufficient structures.
Photo by Adrià Goula, courtesy of Valldaura Labs
Under the direction of Daniel Ibáñez and Vicente Guallart, the 2019–2020 MAEBB class designed and built the 130-square-foot "quarantine cabin," which they executed in just five months as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The students worked with an array of experts to transform local timber into "structural and thermal material" for the project using sustainable forest management practices. The result is a fully equipped, eco-friendly living space where a single occupant can self-isolate for up to 14 days.
The cabin’s exterior is mounted with rain-screen panels, which the students created using waste materials from the CLT-production process.
Photo by Adrià Goula, courtesy of Valldaura Labs
At the start of the project, the students harvested 40 pine trees near the site to be used for the construction. After allowing the wood to dry for three months, they moved the raw material to the Valldaura campus to be processed into thin layers, or lamellas, which the students then pressed to create cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels for the cabin.
The cabin receives electricity from an independent battery storage that can power the lighting and devices for a single resident for up to 14 days.
Photo by Adrià Goula, courtesy of Valldaura Labs
See the full story on Dwell.com: An Off-Grid "Quarantine Cabin" Near Barcelona Harvests Sunlight and Rainwater
Related stories:
