# Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Project - End Homelessness | London Real > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [698]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2014-02-05 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEoFkeRgMo. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Hexayurt framed for homelessness. - Career works it belongs to: - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut. (suggested by machine) - First hexayurt built (2003): The first Hexayurt prototype, built at Burning Man from cardboard panels. (suggested by machine) - H18 (2006): A tall Hexayurt: 18 panels and 12-foot walls. (suggested by machine) - Hexayurt Country (2010): Plan to rehouse Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake in Hexayurts, financed with the money that would... (suggested by machine) - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris (2011): Talk at c-base, Berlin: Larry Wall's three virtues of a programmer applied to building, by a hackitect. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. (through a work suggested by machine) - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community. (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Burning Man shelter building (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Burning Man (6 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); refugee shelter (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); refugees (1 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.21 (1.00 is the top), number 351 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md): close in content (cosine 0.87) - [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md): close in content (cosine 0.87) - On the same works, just before: [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md); [79] [Meaning: Plausible Utopias | The Bucky-Gandhi Design... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/79.md); [753] [(OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus... (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/753.md) - On the same works, just after: [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md); [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md); [310] [Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/310.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Project - End Homelessness | London Real, video, 2014-02-05, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEoFkeRgMo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [698], https://guptaoption.com/texts/698.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEoFkeRgMo&t=0s) what is this thing on the desk right here and why you just built it in my studio here in a matter of minutes what is it so this is the infamous hexayurt and the reason this thing exists is um well I for one thing burning man right okay so how many times have you been to Burning Man oh seven maybe six when was your first one 96 wow I went as soon as I could after I got to America and when was the first one um sometime in the late ' 80s I want to say ' 89 maybe okay Burning Man 95 they had a driveby shooting range right pickup truck tailor dummies assault rifle thr shooting range okay very very nice and in 96 how many people were there I don't know 3,000 maybe okay and now it's 60 60,000 yeah it's big so this thing here the hexayurt right what is it it's an emergency shelter but it's also potentially a longrange solution to the mortgage so if you buy building materials right they come in 4x8 sheets in America here it's 1.2x 2.4 M everything comes in that shape wall pieces are a whole sheet roof pieces are half sheets you could basically just hack these things out of whatever building material you have and the instruction is cut half of the sheets in half bolt it into a shall of roof put it on top of a wall back right boom you have sh for people listening to us on iTunes it is hexayurt so hexayurt it's hexagon on the bottom if you were take a take a cross-section and then the top is kind of not conle but it's kind of sloping upwards to a point and it's literally made of yeah the same number of pieces as the bottom but cut in half right that's pretty cool real simple right 12 sheets of plywood cut six of them in half make them into triangles most people could figure that out if you gave them the pieces and some materials to attach they might get it wrong for a few hours but yeah you know I mean if you've got half a day you'll get it yeah right if you watch the videos and the instructions you know there are literally thousands of people that have done it for the first time at Burning Man on the paa and not screwed it up okay we we never hear stories if we went to Burning Man and we couldn't get our hexayurt up it just doesn't happen how many of these are present at Burning Man um we reckon from the satellite pictures last year it was somewhere between 750 and 1,000 this year we don't have a satellite picture but we think it's about twice that many from reports wow so well over a thousand we don't know how many okay and why do people use them there well you get two hours more sleep in the morning compared to a tent the tents uninhabitable by 8 or 99 the hex you can sleep till noon without even trying okay and that turns into do one [2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEoFkeRgMo&t=150s) more day of actual go like you know if you went if you go out like early in the week by the end of the week you are just toasted from Lock of sleep in too much heat okay take a hexayurt you can be fit as a fiddle Friday night Saturday night Sunday you can actually get your together and get out why did you create this thing uh and how was this yeah where did this come from um refugees okay so a bunch of people asked me whether I could do something about a refugee shelter I knew a bunch about gdic does cuz I used to work in um Graphics software and the math for ggic domes is the same math for computer Graphics right it's all about triangulated surfaces okay so some folks were like can you fix this and I sat down and had a thing no no wait click 15 minutes later had the first one after that it was like okay this is a big deal burning Manon 2003 went there with a tiny one that would fit like you could fit four of them in your living room right I mean they're just they're just tiny um you know anybody with a back Garden you could build one of the small ones so inside of those shelters right you know I'm sitting inside of this thing that I put together with duct tape and cardboard I open the door there's a white out dust storm outside like less than a meter of visibility W close the door again and this thought forms in my head like I have changed the world right I've turned a bunch of industrial cardboard into a thing that has an inside and an outside I didn't even know there was a dust storm right and I put it on a roof rack myself you know there was there was there almost no material there the entire thing weighed probably 30 kilos right and it was a house for two people and it would cost nothing in mass production okay and it keeps you cool in the morning when in a heated scenario and it's warm in the night and so it insulates that air in there yeah but the critical thing is right if you got a really big disaster right say somebody drops in UK New York and you've got to move 20 million people out of the Fallout zone right there aren't 20 million tents sitting around right there aren't 20 million hotels that will take radioactive guests no no no no no right so you've got to go can build literally 4 million houses right and the only material that you remotely have enough of to even think about doing that is plywood okay so you got to try and figure out the minimum trouble way of turning plywood into emergency housing that's about roughly half as efficient again as uh if you build it Square okay so you could build little A-frames or if you want to make your materials go about a third to half further you build hexayurts okay and they're easier to put up there's more space and then at the end [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEoFkeRgMo&t=300s) of that process you can just get rid of them you can just mulch the damn things um to get rid of the radiological contamination just bury them and part of your ethos is kind of to open source this stuff right you've always been about putting your ideas out there so people can use them no copyright no patent right free for allous decision oh yeah absolutely okay cuz look I mean there' have been people inventing cool shelters for 50 years right there are just no end of these cool shelter projects out there none of them ever go anywhere right you get a little company with three or four employees that sells 5,000 units a year and that's as big as it ever gets so most of those shelters are patented and if they're patented you can't make them where you need them you can only make them where the company is it's no good it's just not the solution so no patent you make them where you need them that means you can buy the materials you can configure the design you don't have to screw around um you know you could set up a factory making these things in South Africa tomorrow morning uh you know a month and a half later you'd have a production line and three months after that you'd be housing 20,000 people he --- End of [698] Vinay Gupta - Hexayurt Project - End Homelessness | London Real. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [172](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md) vinay gupta | be you. (2014); the most closely related, [270](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md) Hope For The World (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.