Virtual Shelter — Breki Einarsson

Virtual Village Centre

Homeless Shelter

This project highlights the role of architecture in our urban environments. The objective was to design a public building and advocate for and engage with under served communities of people who have exsperianced homelessness. Through honest inquiry of the urban fabric and the diversity of its inhabitants my proposal is a responsive, empathetic program and a building for homeless drug addicts living in San Francisco. My prgram used virtual reality as a therapy technique that informend the design process. My proposal seeks to create a space were addicts feel a sense of belonging. I believe that no person should not bare to be present in their own life. The singular cause of any addiction is not caused by physical urges but lack of physical bonding and human connections. My proposal is a homeless shelter for recovering addicts that focuses on creating shared community and living spaces that uses virtual reality therapy as a tool to simulate real life situations and help addicts to escape their

Student

Course

Instructor

Location

Semester

Breki Einarsson

Studio 315: Advocacy In Design

Doron Serban

149 Morris St. San Francisco, CA

Spring 2021

Virtual Homeless Shelter in San Francisco

I believe that no person should not bare to be present in their own life. The singular cause of any addiction is not caused by physical urges but lack of physical bonding and human connections. My proposal is a homeless shelter for recovering addicts that focuses on creating shared community and living spaces that uses virtual reality therapy as a tool to simulate real life situations and help addicts to escape their own realities into abstract spaces where they will go through a therapeutic treatment.

Container Society

I choose to make my Case Study for this project about Container Society one of the few homeless shelters in Iceland. Homeless people are provided container homes that are located on the outskirts of Reykjavík. Not many people know about this place and it is covered over it like these people don’t exist. The people there deserve to be treated as people and not live in shame and isolation. The residents of container society are cared for by trained professionals which help them with daily endeavours and even provide them with clean needles to use. I choose container society as my precedent project for designing a homeless shelter on an urban site in San Francisco.
Empathy Through Comics

Homelessness is a fragile conditions and needs to be looked at with empathy and hear peoples story without judgement. In order to design a homeless shelter in San Francisco, where there are thousand of people living on the streets, it is important to listen to the people who live without a home. In order to tell their story I choose to do it through comics to better immerse myself in their reality.
Storytelling

Comics are a great way to tell a story and in my case I created a short comic about a young man in Reykjavík who late at night discovers container society for the first time. The protagonist gets to know a man living in one of the containers, the man name is Gummi.