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Architecture Students Design Pop-Up Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues for Refugee Camps

Temporary places of worship made for the displaced

By definition, refugees are people without a place. And while refugee camps are able to offer temporary shelter, they rarely have the kind of dedicated religious spaces that can help build and unite a community. To address this issue, and help provide the displaced with another connection to their regular lives, a pair of Yale architecture students have designed a set of pop-up religious buildings with the hopes of providing a different kind of shelter for refugees.

Lucas Boyd and Chad Greenlee crafted plans for temporary, easy-to-assemble religious spaces to accommodate the basic requirements of the world’s three largest religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The duo hopes that such pop-up places of worship will offer comfort and cultural support to those forced to leave their homes behind.

The three different building types were designed to subtly evoke the traditional architecture of more conventional religious spaces, such as the peaked roof of the Christian chapel, and the open, courtyard-like design of a mosque.

Pop-Up Religious Buildings Could Sustain Culture In Refugee Camps [PSFK]

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Upcoming MoMA Exhibition Will Explore Refugee Shelters [Curbed]