The future of disaster response

David Sellers, AIA, didn’t initially choose to get involved with disaster relief. Instead, it found him when disaster landed on his doorstep with the arrival of the 2023 Maui wildfires.  

“Our community needed help,” he says, explaining why his firm responded after the disaster. Sellers is the co-founder and principal of Hawaii Off-Grid Architecture & Engineering and has spent his career designing structures that are resilient and sustainable.  

Because his firm has maintained a strong dedication to providing design services that benefit the larger Maui community rather than just individual clients, Hawaii Off-Grid was able to step in quickly after wildfires destroyed over 2,200 buildings in the town of Lahaina, on Maui’s west side, in August of 2023. In addition to significant loss of life, the fires caused an estimated $6 billion in damage, with around 13,000 people displaced from their homes.  

“We were already plugged in,” Sellers says. “We had a multi-decade relationship with [Family Life Center], which was already working in the housing space for people who needed housing.” (Family Life Center is a housing-focused nonprofit.)

Ohana Hope Village, the solution that Sellers’ firm worked on with Family Life Center, is an 88-home village designed to provide families who were displaced from the Maui wildfires with shelter while they awaited the rebuilding of more permanent housing options. Sellers’ firm was able to leverage existing modular container home technology made by Hungarian company Continest while prioritizing features like private and easily accessible bathrooms and kitchens.  

The Continest units, originally earmarked for displaced people in Ukraine, got to Maui via “a small miracle,” as Continest CEO Yan Pronin told NPR in 2023, thanks to the efforts of diplomats and multiple Family Life Center and Continest officials. The units ultimately arrived on NATO aircraft.  

“I got a picture of them loading in a C-17 and I said, ‘Oh wow, this is real. Yeah, let’s hurry up.’ And we worked through the night and through the weekend and came up with this plan,” Sellers said, also talking to NPR in 2023.  

From fires to flooding  

Disaster similarly landed on the doorstep of Aaron Bowman, AIA, with the arrival of flooding in South Carolina in 2015. While the state is well-prepared for storm surges along the coast, an unexpected 1,000-year storm in the inland state capital of Columbia caused extensive damage and flooding.  

“It was something that took a lot of us off guard,” he says.  

Bowman was on the board of AIA South Carolina at the time. The storm prompted Bowman and a group of local architects to form a committee that built connections with state agencies, including a flood commission formed after the 2015 event that evolved into the South Carolina Office of Resilience.  

“We were able to [develop] a relationship with the South Carolina Emergency Management Division,” Bowman says. “The eventuality of this is that we became part of what’s called the housing recovery support function.”  

Two years ago, Hurricane Helene took another devastating toll on South Carolina, causing massive flooding that killed an estimated 49 people and inflicted over $1 billion in damage. Bowman and other members of AIA South Carolina’s Disaster Assistance Committee participated in calls with state agencies and other stakeholders related to the recovery process. The state applied for direct housing assistance or so-called FEMA trailers, but they were denied because, according to the federal agency, the damage wasn’t extensive enough.  

“If this isn’t bad enough, what’s it going to take?” Bowman remembers thinking at the time. AIA South Carolina and its partners were forced to acknowledge the changing funding landscape at the federal level, impacting the assistance that FEMA and HUD can provide after a devastating event.  

“A group on one of our calls said, ‘Well, we really need to think about, when the next one comes, how can we be better prepared to address this?’” Bowman says. “So, we had the idea to launch this working group to study post-disaster housing options for South Carolina.”

Bowman says that his state chapter is part of a unique coalition of state agencies and industry partners that includes the Manufactured Housing Institute of South Carolina, representatives from Clemson University, representatives from the Institute for Business and Home Safety, and others. The group has been meeting for about a year, analyzing case studies and exploring post-disaster temporary housing options that could be feasible for South Carolina residents, like the flatpack modular units used after the Lahaina fires.    

“Connecting those dots and having those conversations is so important—just general knowledge sharing,” he says. 

Broadening the conversation  

Sellers and Bowman will share their expertise during a September 24 AIAU course titled Architects and the Future of Post-Disaster Temporary Housing, encouraging other design professionals to become involved with disaster response and learn what they can do in their local communities to assist in providing housing solutions in the wake of natural disasters. Bowman says that while there are many steps architects can take to get involved, it’s important to understand that the process is complex—and that early relationship-building is crucial. Sellers echoes this sentiment.  

“Get involved and be engaged in the community you live in,” he says. “We need to be pushing architecture forward.”  

Both Bowman and Sellers are working on next steps to support post-disaster housing recovery in their respective states, the results of which could have applications and benefits across the country. Sellers is writing a post-disaster temporary building code as an amendment to the International Building Code that will make it easier to get temporary housing built after a disaster strikes. 

Bowman and his AIA South Carolina working group are developing a design competition to solicit designs and concepts. A second stage of the competition will prototype different temporary housing models, testing for variables like cost and speed of implementation.  

Bowman and Sellers agree that as extreme weather events become more devastating and frequent, the role of the architect is evolving. They’ll encourage attendees of the AIAU webinar—and AIA members in general—to get involved at the community level and start developing solutions before they’re needed.  

“There’s a lot of change coming. We’re already seeing it, and we have to be the ones steering that change,” Sellers says. “We’ve got to put ourselves in the driver’s seat of the bus, or someone else is going to steer it.”  

While the enormity of the task and the scale of the disasters can seem daunting, Bowman says that it’s important not to get overwhelmed.  

“How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time,” he says.  

Register here for the AIAU course Architects and the Future of Post-Disaster Temporary Housing on September 24.  

Katherine Flynn is AIA’s director, digital content.