Victoria Lee has been working for an NGO aiding groups providing emergency shelter.
Gates scholar Victoria Lee has just finished working for an NGO in Switzerland giving guidelines on emergency shelter following natural disasters.
Her work will feed into her PhD in Architecture, which she has just commenced, on the mismatches between how well a building can resist earthquakes and how effectively it can protect occupants from challenging climates, such as hurricanes and cold winters. “There are a lot of buildings in the world that need to resist both the long term and short term hazards, but are designed for neither purpose or only for one,” she says.
She will be tackling the research from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. “You have to look at problems from different perspectives, from an engineering, social, cultural and economic viewpoint as well as an architectural one. A lot of problems are multi-layered so it is essential that there is input from all disciplines. My skills as an architect are only as useful as the extent of understanding I have of the problem I want to solve,” she says.
