Staff and students are invited to the private view of HEXAYURT? an exhibition inspired by Vinay Gupta’s recent visit to Winchester School of Art during which he and the MA Fine Art students built a hexayurt in the School grounds.

Students were asked to respond to this in whatever manner was appropriate for their work. They were not requested to design shelters or to figure out a way to improve the hexayurt. This is not a project about attempting to do what Vinay spent many years doing. The responses could be emotional, intellectual, imaginative, formal, conceptual, associative, analytic, sensual, or some combination of these and might be realised in any medium/material. At the centre of the exhibition is a video document of the workshop and hexyurt build at Winchester School of Art.

Vinay Gupta:

Vinay is one of the world’s leading thinkers on infrastructure theory, state failure solutions, and managing global system risks including poverty/development and the environmental crisis. Vinay has made substantial contributions to disaster relief, contingency management and environmentalism. While at the Rocky Mountain Institute, he worked on Small is Profitable on renewable energy economics; and Winning the Oil Endgame, a Pentagon funded study on US energy independence. His core approach is to design public domain technological solutions which render hard problems soluble. Most notable is the hexayurt, a disaster relief shelter designed to be?made using standard building industry components and skills; and Cheap ID, a genocide-resistant biometrics architecture designed for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The Hexayurt is an update on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and is a sturdy, affordable, easy-to-build temporary shelter. The geometry has been adjusted slightly to make it easier to build from materials like plywood, insulation, plastic, cardboard and more. The hexayurts are made from only one kind of triangle: an 8′ x 8′ isosceles triangle, rather than the strangely-shaped triangles which are standard for Fuller-style geodesic domes.

The exhibition runs from 21/11/11–15/12/11. The gallery is open during Library opening hours, 7.30–0.00 weekdays and 9.00-0.00 weekends.

For more information please visit the level 4?Gallery blog http://level4gallery.wordpress.com/ and?http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/about http://hexayurt.com/