12-year-old Makes Homeless Shelter from Trash

Well, this is a bit of fresh air, especially with tween news like Baby-Faced Boy Alfie Patten Is Dad At 13.

12-year-old Max Wallack stole the show at Design Squad’s Trash to Treasure contest with his “Home Dome.” The contest asked kids to repurpose trash into practical inventions.

I wonder if the Home Dome gets an honorable LEED Certification?

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The dome provides shelter for the homeless and is made from plastic, wire, packing peanuts, and flargstin. Pretty much, trash.

The trash-plex looks like a Mongolian yurt, and let Max walk away with $10,000 and a Dell laptop. He also got a trip to Boston out of it. But Max had this to say, “I don’t really care about the money. I care about helping people.”

This isn’t his first big win. “When I was six,” Max said, “I won an invention contest that included a trip to Chicago. While there, I saw homeless people living on streets, and beneath highways and underpasses. I felt very sorry for these people, and ever since then, felt that my goal and obligation was to find a way to help them. My invention improves the living conditions for homeless people, refugees, or disaster victims by giving them easy-to-assemble shelter.”

Go Max! We all look forward to your future inventions.

Source and Photo:  thedesignblog.org

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193 Comments

  1. Awesome - I printed this down for future reference. In todays world it pays to be prepared. You should send this to Oprah for those people in tent cities. Some of them have been there for more than a year and I understand the mayor is looking to make that legal and give them some help to make it more permanent.

  2. One has only to drive through the countryside, looking at old farmhouses. There is a reason the evergreen trees are usually planted on the north side of the house, with one or more large deciduous trees on the south (to provide shade in the summer, and let the sun through in the winter). Architects seemingly fail to consider the impact of the elements in design. I see more and more houses with one or no windows on the south side. I suppose that is so that the AC does not have to run all summer. Why not simply leave some of the nice trees and use them for the purposes our ancestors knew about and did not need an architect!

  3. That ‘anon’ poster that said lose the vitriol obviously has no sense of humor or courage for that matter since they didn’t include their name with their comment. I thought it was funny! Keep up the vitriol!

  4. What a fantastic idea! With the cost of food going up, and the need to become more self sufficient in every way, I can see how this would be a great and inexpensive idea for building a chicken coop to raise your own food.

    Rita

  5. I didn’t think this was vitriolic at all! Quite mild, in fact. Great humor, keep it up!

  6. Freakin Hilaaarious. love your truth-bearing sarcasm…

    I live up the hill from an ex-apple-farm turned McMansion-ville and had the honor of witnessing how these puppies are built… that is to say AFTER they rape, pillage & destroy the hundreds of acres of “natural” land that they plop these bad-boys on.

    Wow is the only word I can think of for the price tag attached to such poorly constructed & intuitive-less built homes.

    What rhymes with McMansion? unconscious

    great post!

  7. I have an idea; one could build a house out of discarded Garage Doors….

  8. Why is this guy getting any credit for this desing. The Mexicans have been building this type of house in Mexico since shipping pallets were invented.

    I have an idea; one could build a house out of discarded Garage Doors…

  9. alot of companies get money back on those pallets, so make sure before hauling them away.

  10. I would have loved a yurt but when I looked into them after I lost my home in hurricane Ivan on Pensacola Beach a yurt is considered a temporary shelter just as a tent is and therefore I could not build a yurt. Same thing happened again after hurricane Katrina and I lost my home in Long Beach, MS. I could not build a yurt on the land. So unless you live in BFE you can’t build a yurt. I love them and have build one for each of my 3 children, my sister and myself; such a shame. If you have land and there are no such codes you should definitely have a yurt.

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