"Refuge for 2 hours" by Leslie Dowling 
  

I did this drawing in 1991 for an undergraduate school project (University of Florida) that explored the notion of shelter- a project I titled, 'Refuge in the City'. Following a class trip, we were tasked with selecting five unique sites throughout the city of Boston to design individual accommodations for the homeless. In my attempt to create these customized shelters, I became somewhat cynical about architecture as ever being able to adequately address the monumental problem of homelessness. As an architectural endeavor, I ultimately saw refuge as not being necessarily about physical shelter, but providing a means of temporary refuge.

My project proposed five, separate staged means of temporary refuge- Refuge for 2 hrs. (presented here), Refuge for 6 hrs., Refuge from Hiding, Refuge from View and, lastly, Refuge from the Victimization of Public Life. Twenty years into my architectural career, the premise of that project still challenges me.