Designer Creates Origami Cardboard Tents to Shelter the Homeless from the Winter Cold

Dur­ing the day, Xavier Van der Stap­pen runs an elec­tric car com­pa­ny. At night, the Bel­gian entrepreneur/designer helps spear­head the ORIG-AMI project, which cre­ates origa­mi-style card­board tents designed to shield Brus­sels’ home­less from the bit­ter cold of win­ter. Card­board is light and portable. It holds heat fair­ly well. And the card­board tents (as opposed to oth­er struc­tures) are legal on Brus­sels’ streets. The cost for each life-sav­ing struc­ture? Only $36.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to “Hijack” Ama­zon Prime for Good: Short Video Shows How Prime & Oth­er Instant Deliv­ery Ser­vices Can Eas­i­ly Help the Home­less

MIT Cre­ates Amaz­ing Self-Fold­ing Origa­mi Robots & Leap­ing Chee­tah Robots

How Josephine Bak­er Went From Home­less Street Per­former to Inter­na­tion­al Super­star, French Resis­tance Fight­er & Civ­il Rights Hero