If you’ve seen “binishell homes” popping up across architecture feeds this year, you’re not imagining it. The iconic inflatable concrete house—originally invented in the 1960s by architect Dante Bini—is suddenly back in global headlines. And there’s one big reason: climate resilience. And hey, Robert Downey Junior lives in one.

As heatwaves intensify and disasters become more frequent, governments and aid agencies are searching for housing solutions that are fast, affordable, low-carbon, and structurally strong. In California you can use hemp concrete and they are fire retardant.

Binishell is a dome-shaped building created by inflating a giant balloon and spraying reinforced concrete around it. The technique delivers astonishing speed—often under an hour per unit once the form is in place—and excellent durability, especially against earthquakes, cyclones, fires, and possibly even floods.

Search interest for binishell cost, binishell homes, and inflatable concrete house cost has jumped as engineers look for alternatives to slow, expensive, and carbon-heavy conventional construction. While full pricing varies by size, reinforcement type, and location, Binishells consistently reduce materials, labor hours, and waste.

Their air-form method uses up to 30–50% less concrete than a traditional box-shaped building and requires fewer skilled trades—an increasingly critical factor during emergency rebuilds when the local workforce is strained.

Inflatable concrete homes excel where disasters hit hardest. Their aerodynamic shape resists wind uplift, their monolithic shell minimizes weak points, and their thermal mass keeps interiors cool in summer and warm in winter—essential in regions struggling with both heat stress and energy scarcity. Concrete itself is not sustainable but new innovations using materials like hemp can make it so.

A growing number of countries and regions such as Gaza, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan are Muslim and are naturally attracted to dome-shaped building, making Binishells an excellent idea if some company can actually make it happen.

What makes this approach especially valuable is reusability: once the crisis passes, these strong, permanent structures can transition seamlessly into long-term public assets. They could be used as housing units for boarding schools or facilities where small businesses or artisans can work. If made moveable, they could function as a second space for homes in the region.

Turkey, for example, repurposed post-earthquake emergency housing built years ago with the help of Israel into into student dormitories. Binishells fit perfectly into this model: fast when needed, durable for decades, and flexible enough to become schools, healthcare posts, or creative workshops once families are resettled.

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Building back home and dignity can work with local, sustainable materials

Somalia faces one of the world’s most persistent displacement crises, with millions uprooted by conflict, drought, and climate-driven instability. As emergency camps grow into semi-permanent settlements, the need for long-term, affordable, and culturally grounded housing becomes urgent. A new proposal, Shelters of the Future, offers precisely that: a mud-brick modular framework rooted in Somali building traditions yet designed for resilience, dignity, and community.

Developed by designer Rabie Al Ashi in Saudi Arabia in collaboration with Kengo Kuma & Associates, Shelters of the Future won first prize in an international competition led by Somalia’s Ministry of Public Works, Reconstruction and Housing (MoPWRH), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and Young Architects Competition (YAC). It stands out for its elegant simplicity: a shelter system that relies on local materials, local skills, and local cultural logic.

With so much goodwill going into designing new refugee shelters from the western world –– see our 2014 article on refugee shelters from IKEA and designers in Jordan, we are still seeing Gazans and Somalis living under tarps.

Read our article: Refugee shelters we hate to love

Still, we celebrate ideas and appreciate this design because it works with vernacular materials and takes into account the local.

At the heart of the design is a flexible 4×4-meter module, a human-scaled unit pairing two enclosed rooms with a semi-open central space and a private garden. This small footprint is deceptively powerful: it gives each household privacy, a safe outdoor space, and the ability to arrange interior life according to Somali social norms. The module becomes a building block—units can be combined into courtyards, linear clusters, or circular compounds that echo traditional Somali settlement patterns. Compare this to the shelters Somalis have built in Yemen, below.

Materiality grounds the system firmly in place. Structures are built from mud bricks, acacia logs, palm leaves, and earth-based plasters—materials that are renewable, inexpensive, and readily available. Mud bricks in particular offer thermal mass, keeping interiors cooler during the day and warmer at night, an essential feature in Somalia’s hot, arid climate.

Construction is intentionally low-tech: shelters can be built by residents themselves, strengthening local craftsmanship and reducing reliance on imported humanitarian products that often fail in desert climates.

The design also incorporates passive cooling strategies—cross-ventilation, shaded openings, and breathable walls—to make life more comfortable without the need for electricity. Gender-sensitive layouts support safety and cultural expectations. Small gardens, livestock spaces, and shaded communal zones help rebuild livelihoods and social cohesion.

We’ve spent weeks in Sinai in the simple hushas there made from palm fronds and bamboo. They can be remarkably comfortable even at night when the cold winds blow.

Rather than treating displacement as a temporary emergency, this project is reframed as a human condition requiring stability, community, and dignity. By combining vernacular wisdom with adaptable modular planning, the project offers a model for refugee housing that is scalable, low-carbon, and deeply respectful of local identity.

For Somalia’s displaced families, a mud-brick home may be the most modern solution of all.

::IOM

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New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is hosting an exhibition on refugee shelters to kickstart dialogue on the design challenges caused by humanitarian crises. Entitled “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter”, the show looks at emergency housing in contemporary crisis zones. It is the first time a major museum has explored the plight of the world’s homeless. 

Humanitarian design is a broad category of industrial design, architecture, and engineering that focuses on improving the human experience. In the Middle East, the term was hijacked to describe structures and artefacts designed to help refugees and displaced people cope with homelessness and lack of essential services. Think it’s a boutique niche in modern design?  Think again.

One out of every 113 humans alive today is either a refugee or displaced internally in their home nation, so says the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. More than 4.8 million people have fled Syria since the onset of its civil war, and the stampede towards the borders hasn’t stopped. That’s comparable to Afghanistan, which has generated millions of refugees for decades. Turn to Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Yemen, and understand the United Nations calculation that 65.8 million people are presently, and forcibly, removed from their homes.

These people need shelter, a specific kind of shelter that can be rapidly deployed and easily assembled with basic tools and labor skills.The MoMA exhibition assesses some iconic contemporary designs to find what works, and what doesn’t.

“This exhibition raises questions rather than tries to provide answers,” curator Sean Anderson told Fast Company. “How does architecture and design today reflect, or not reflect, these conditions of transit? In the carving up of new territories and the creation of new border systems, we begin to see how architecture plays into the spatial or geospatial ideas of identity.”

Green Prophet has written extensively on design solutions proffered to date, including 10 intriguing solutions in this 2014 post (link here). And continuing development of open-source design platforms – such as Open Architecture (formerly Architecture for Humanity) and the Open Building Institute – serve up practical, smart architecture designed by professionals and released freely for use and/or adaptation by the public with a goal of improving worldwide housing.

Designs that address the challenges of conflict and mass migration also have currency in disaster relief. Consider the looming impact of climate change on coastal communities, towns vulnerable to either severe drought or flooding, and urban areas devastated by extreme weather events. “I think with climate change we are going to see a vast influx and repositioning of what it means to be a refugee in the future,” said Anderson.  So add climate refugees to the global parade.

The exhibition includes shelters from refugee camps in Kenya, Jordan, and Turkey, as well as experimental solutions by architects such as Shigeru Ban’s 1999 paper-tube structures for Rwandan refugees and bamboo houses by Norwegian firm TYIN Tegnestue.

Iranian architect Nader Khalili’s sandbag shelters, seen above, are simple dirt-filled sandbags which can be hand-assembled by six unskilled laborers in a single day. “You could argue that these structures are fundamentally about materiality and the ability to move them into sites relatively quickly,” Anderson says.

Those characteristics are embedded in the IKEA shelter, seen below, which can fit into two flat pack boxes that include all components plus hardware and simple tools. Fifty units can be loaded on a flatbed truck and quickly delivered anywhere that has road access.

Anderson travelled to refugee camps in Jordan, Italy and Sri Lanka to see shelters in situ, noting an absolute absence of site sensitivity.  As example, Jordan’s Zaatari Syrian refugee camp is on an open desert plateau, pummeled by sandstorms and naturally teeming with scorpions and vermin.

“What was really just eye-opening to me was the lack of imagination but also consideration of where these shelters are,” he said. “It was 120°F out and you see acres and acres of metal buildings with one or two small windows. So people can’t live in these structures during the day.” Occupants have to choose between leaving doors open for added airflow, which compromised security.

The metal cabins replaced the original UNHCR fabric tents, but residents were allowed to kep those tents – to re-purpose or sell to other refugees within the camp. “What was more intriguing to me was how [the refugees] began to manipulate and change and augment these spaces,” Anderson told Fast Company. “The most poignant moment for me was sitting for a few hours in a large tent and the man said, ‘I’m a Bedouin, I know how to build tents and I refuse to live in these metal boxes.'”

“In this desire for maximum visibility, maximum rationality, and organization, there is a lack then of individuality,” Anderson says. “These individuals who are moving or are being forcibly moved from various countries literally lose their identity to go into places that are for their own safety and security and become a number in a system that they don’t necessarily recognize or understand. Shelter is not an end in itself; it actually requires a close observation of the client. What are the everyday needs of these individuals? I would suggest that it’s more than just access to food and water, but they deserve a bit of privacy and a bit of humanity.” He added that paying attention to regional building styles from the displaced population’s homeland would make for stronger designs.

The show distinguishes short-term emergency shelters from long-term refugee housing. A refugee might live in an “interim” camp for many years awaiting a return home or resettlement abroad. Consider the Kenyan camp Dadabb which opened a quarter century ago. Many of the Syrians in Zaatari are now into their fifth year of residency.

“If we see camps as permanent impermanent conditions architecturally, what’s overlooked is the landscape and the very nature of how do we transform the landscape to accommodate these cities,” Anderson said. “Everyone I interviewed [at Zaatari] said they would rather have better telephone reception than better housing.”

Got some time (and tolerance of architectural hyperbole)? Tuck into the video above, and learn more as MoMA director Glenn Lowry discusses the opening of this exhibition and a second show entitled “How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior,” with curators Sean Anderson and Juliet Kinchin.

“Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter” will be on view starting until January 22, 2017.  “How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior” will be on view through April 23, 2017.

All images from MoMA website 

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Refugees like those who have fled Syria or Sudan or… spend on average twelve years in a temporary home, which got us thinking: what makes a good shelter? With climate change creating more refugees, the answer isn’t simple:

A robust, durable structure may be costly and hard to ship, while tents that are easy to ship en masse can be shredded in rough weather. And we need to think about the ecological aspect. Join us as we weigh the pros and cons of 10 refugee shelters:

In our analysis of different refugee shelters, we have included structures that have already been used first, and then added a few interesting concepts at the end. While the latter half have yet to be proven in the “real world,” it’s worth thinking about ways to improve existing shelters in order to ensure that refugees have the best quality of life possible. They deserve to have a home, even if it is temporary, that allows them to rebuild their lives.

1. IKEA’s solar-powered flatpack prefab refugee shelter

IKEA teamed up with the UNHCR to develop a solar-powered flatpack shelter that could be easily deployed to refugee camps or scenes of natural disasters. These are durable and provide ample security, as well as electricity that allow children to learn after dark and their parents to work.

Once in mass production, they should only cost $1,000 each, they house five people, and they only weigh 100kg. Downside? The shelters are only designed to last a few years (though that is common in refugee housing, which is not supposed to be a permanent solution, and also common in IKEA’s reason for being!) and aesthetically they aren’t so pleasing.

2. Stackable Exo emergency refugee shelters

That they are stackable (like styrofoam cups, their inspiration) comprise the main benefit of Reaction Housing’s Exo emergency shelters because that allows for easy transportation. They are also solar-powered and insulated, and they are secure, which is a huge must in disaster situations.

Made of aircraft-grade aluminum, they are durable, which means they should last, and they can be reused. The main downside to this design is size. Albeit just 80 square feet, they can fit up to four people in bunk beds, but they don’t allow for much else. Plus, they are currently very costly.

3. UNHCR’s lightweight, temporary tent shelters

I’ve included the two kinds of shelters that are most commonly deployed in this list in order to demonstrate what is actually practical in the field. The UN refugee agency uses two kinds of refugee structures and this is the more lightweight, temporary option.

While cheap and easy to ship en masse, as you can see above, they offer very little comfort and are easily destroyed. These are very basic shelters that simply put some space between refugees and the elements.

Trouble is, with more than 40 million refugees in the world and money scarce, aid agencies can hardly be expected to procure five star housing or glamping. Even so, efforts are constantly made to rethink refugee housing design – as evidenced by the IKEA prefab.

4. UNHCR’s canvas tents

These canvas tents are designed to last quite a bit longer than the emergency refugee shelters and are the most common variety deployed in refugee camps. This particular image was taken at the Dadaab camp in Kenya.

At 4×4 meters, they provide more space than the lightweight shelters; also, given that they are made from 50 percent cotton and 50 percent polyester canvas, they are both more durable and waterproof. But they aren’t very livable, have no partitions, no electricity. UNHCR pays manufacturers in India and Pakistan about $195 for one of these.

5. Nader Khalili’s buildings fit for space

While not commonly used, Nader Khalili’s earth buildings, which were originally designed with NASA to be used in space make great emergency housing. We love Nader, as he thinks about the soul elements of the person in these structures.

Constructed with sacks of earth stacked on top of one another in a circular plan and then covered in earth. These shelters rely on local materials, local labor, are quick and easy to construct and they are literally dirt cheap. These may not be the most suitable solution in tropical climates however – not because they won’t be cool, because they are beautifully insulated, but because it might be hard to find dry soil with which to fill them.

6. Clean Hub refugee shelter

First used in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina threw the city into absolute mayhem, the Clean Hub refugee shelter (link to organization is no longer working as of Oct., 2019) is built in part from a repurposed shipping container. At 160 square foot, the hub is a portable, self-sustaining source of clean water, electricity and sanitation, and it can be fabricated and shipped anywhere in the world within days.

But it’s very costly at $15,000. Unless they are mass produced so that the price comes right down, this is not a sustainable solution. Maybe take this defunct solution as a model on how to do it better.

7. Ex-Container for refugees

After the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, local architects designed the Ex-Container, a double story prefabricated tiny home modeled after a 20 foot shipping container. They are rugged, and have a clean, beautiful interior. Unfortunately, the government rejected the company’s efforts to have them widely distributed; seems like another firm won the bid. It is unclear how much these costs.

And well, there are so many problems with container housing over all – read our in-house architect’s take on how terrible containers (cargotecture!) are for the environment. Time to fall out of love with the solution.

Certainly they are cheaper to build than the Clean Hub, but probably not as cheap or as convenient as IKEA’s flatpack homes.

8. Collapsible woven refugee shelters powered by the sun

The first of our conceptual designs, this collapsible woven shelter designed by Abeer Seikaly went viral. Portable and clad in a solar skin that generates electricity, this shelter also harvests and drains rainwater. Designed to give refugees a sense of ownership and dignity in addition to security and self-sufficiency, it is super lightweight.

On the downside, this design might be complicated, which could be a barrier to widespread development, and the solar skin could really amp up costs.

9. Shapeshifting shelter for refugees made by AI

Yahya Ibraheem from Jordan submitted this design Shapeshifting shelter to us. She wrote her thesis about how parametric modeling can be used to improve refugee shelters, and in so doing, generated a few really nice features that make a lot of sense. Parametric modelling uses the computer to design objects or systems that model component attributes with real world behaviour.

This refugee tent can be customized to fit different sized families and different climate conditions and the interior can be partitioned to make different rooms, such as bedrooms, bathrooms or kitchens.

Still very much in its infancy stage (Ibraheem has yet to address the materials that might be used or what it might cost to produce this design), it is unlikely to be used in real-world applications, but it does make some very serious thought breakthroughs that could be useful to aid agencies.

10. Life Box for refugee shelter

We really love the idea of the Life Box in part because it is suits different needs in different situations. There are three kinds – ‘air’, ‘land’ and ‘water,’ and just like it sounds, they all come right out of a box.

The ‘air’ type refugee box is used for disaster areas that can be only reached by aircraft, and the outer layer is used as parachute during airdropping.

The ‘land’ type refugee box can be used in areas that are reachable by road, but its outer layer is placed inside the box.

The ‘water’ life box is designed specifically for flood-affected areas, and can be used on land and water. The Life Box has won a Red Dot Design award two years running and it’s easy to see why.

In addition to being easy to ship, lightweight, the four-person shelter even contains provisions! It’s a great short term solution, but it wouldn’t be great to live in this for more than a couple of days.

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