ARCHIMEDE INSTITUTE


ARCHIMEDE HURRICANE SHELTERS

CONTACTS

Membership:
To reach us, send email to Jacques at jacquesbpoirier@gmail.com

Press:
Contact Nikki at beaudrynicole@yahoo.com

Jobs applicants: 
Contact Sid at: bajacq@gmail.com


Skype: 
Contact Jacques through Skype: jimpoir


THE INSTITUTE'S MISSION

Our mission is to use our diverse pool of experience to improve the design, the production and thus the availability of:
  • Cyclone shelters for hurricane prone areas.
  • Refugee and medical shelters for harsh environments.
  • Temporary housing serving vastly diverse clienteles.
  • Low-cost social-housing in difficult physical or social environments.
  • Rebuilding programs for disaster zones, flooded areas, tsunami, earthquake and hurricane victim zones. These programs include everything from low-cost social housing to high-end beach resorts.
  • Mobile or temporary housing units for health, security and logistic workers.
  • Fully equiped headquarters for NGOs and emergency management groups.
  • Individual housing for special needs in special contexts (More later).
Our aim is to help alleviate the worldwide shortages of these special construction projects. Our basic aim is to use all our skills and experience to make these more economical to produce while infinitely more reliable. To do all of this on a fast-track procurement , design, testing, manufacturing and delivery schedule is our ultimate goal. Ours is a non-profit organization and all of our past and future development ideas are and will be of public domain. To that end our patents will be licensed free of charge to all developing or disaster afflicted nations.

  • We will always choose the most expedient and economical methods for our clients to reach their goals, forming their construction professionals, training their building crews, teaching their industrialist to produce our solutions locally.
  • To that end, after a design is accepted, we create a few prototypes for testing purposes, but also to give the representatives of the client a chance to learn the methods hands-on, living with us for a few weeks until he feels ready to duplicate our tooling and methods in his own country.
  • When the budget allows, our own multi-skill and multilingual building crews will travel to the client's country to build prototypes while training local construction workers with our techniques.
Our most sincere wish is to see a tenfold increase of the number of available cyclone shelters worldwide before 2012. This is entirely possible if we do it together. As a side benefit, the technology will seep through regular construction worldwide, helping produce a 10,000-fold increase in houses that ARE protected against hurricanes (or typhoons or cylcones). This could actually reduce the number of shelters required for an enlarging population. Before 2020? That's as good a target as any, don't you agree?

Jacques B. Poirier, Director
The Archimede Institute
Cantamar MX

THE PROBLEMS WITH EXISTING REFUGEE TENTS

Azerbajan Tent Villages
















Pakistani Earthquake of 2005










Iraqui-Jordan Refugees
Collapsed tents, taken down by the U.N. refugee agency because of high winds and the dust storms , line an empty refugee camp on a cold, wind-swept plain near the far eastern Jordanian town of Al-Ruweishid, 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Jordanian-Iraqi border Wednesday, March 26, 2003. This refugee camp is ready to receive thousands of fleeing Iraqis because of the US-led strike against Saddam Hussein 's regime, but so far, there isn't a single one. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Typical Refugee Tent Catalog

GOOGLE MAP- For A Satellite View of Some of our Projects

CONSTRUCTION

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DESIGNING

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EARTHQUAKES

Ground shaking lasting sometimes for just a few seconds to up to over one minute affect construction that is not capable of handling the sway induced by these lateral vibrations. Mostly rigid structures with high center of gravity are subject to huge stresses at connector areas.Masonry construction is the first victim whereas lightweight steel of wood construction with adequate connector reinforcement can handle these exceptional stresses quite well.
Archimede systems has 3 great assets for earthquakes, whether on high columns or on a ground slab:
  1. A system of shear walls oriented in three axis vs only two, as with orthogonal construction with right angle wall intersections.
  2. Lightweight rigid construction where stresses and strains are distributed throughout the entire envelope.
  3. Steel or concrete columns long enough to absorb most of the horizontal sway, thus protecting the shell held above (valid for stilt construction Archimede solutions).

ETHICAL

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FLOODS

Quite obviously the raised Archimede houses can take on any flood. Even when the flood rises beyond the shell's lower edges, the tightness of the envelope will keep the water out. In cases where the water level is expected to rise much higher, we recommend a style of stilts developed to extend out, allowing floatation to take over. For tsunami shelters, a breakaway system allows the entire house to float away, tethered to a chain anchored to the ground. In this manner, the house is more capable of dealing with the floating debris that could  impact the shelter negatively if it was fixed in one place.

GREEN

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HURRICANES

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