What would you do if your home was just destroyed in a fire, its cold, and you need a place to spend the night? You might call up a relative, or go the YMCA or the local shelter, get a hotel room or spend the night at the hospital. What would you do if your home and your entire village had just been leveled by an earthquake, its cold, and you need a place to stay? You might call on the UN or the Red Cross to send you a bunch of Hexayurts.

The Hexayurt is a refugee shelter system based on work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. It uses an approach based on "autonomous building" to provide not just a shelter, but a comprehensive family support unit.

The hexayurt is an amazing structure because of how simple it is. Just because its simple doesn’t mean it lacks human comforts. It has solar water purification for drinking water, a composting toilet, a fuel-efficient wood gas stove, and solar electric lighting. With the ability to add other systems as self contained modules. So how easy it is to build? Check these videos out.

These amazing shelters could have saved many lives after the earth quake in Pakistan, and provided much needed shelter after the Asian tsunami. But I could also see them being used for the urban and rural homeless population of the world. The beats a tin shack any day.

The best part about this that each unit costs between $200-$500+ with the infrastructure package coming in at $100. So you may be able to heat, provide water, light, and shelter for as little as $300 per person. The units can be deployed in great density in a sea container and built on site as Vinay Gupta Describes in this video.

Check out this presentaion (pdf) for more info about the Hexayurt.