the-sheet.com Your Architecture Resource

Come the end of the world, you might like to sit it out in style. All you need is money and a few DIY skills…

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, "social anarchy", solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground "assurance of life" resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that "Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis", and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist's surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. "Virtually any meal" can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes "baked potato soup" but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications.

How long do the rest of us have to decide? "Nobody knows" when disaster will strike but Vivos takes a shot at guessing, sourcing clues from Nostradamus, the Bible and Native American lore to suggest 2019, 2029 and 2036 as danger years. But the real fear is for 21 December 2012, a date forecast for doom by the Mayans and towards which a countdown clock on Vivos's website ticks.

We ought not to get too comfy over the next couple of years either: President Obama's recent warnings about nuclear terrorism proved "timely", a Vivos spokesperson told the Observer. "Doomsday may be closer than many would otherwise like to believe..."

It's warning enough. £32,000? Check. Carpentry skills? Check. Jogging bottoms? Check. Good luck in the hills.

Most of them focus on buildings rather than people, and will be of little use in Haiti or Chile

Steve Rose's article concerning Haiti and the demands of disaster-zone architecture is wide of the mark when he states that shelter after disaster and the plight of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers are "real, urgent problems for architects to solve" (Out of the wreckage, 15 February).

As I was told by a professor when studying some 20 years ago, the role of architects in these circumstances is "marginal at best". In fact, most architects are taught almost the exact opposite of what is needed. Architects are taught to focus on the product (a building), whereas humanitarian practitioners major on the process (involving people). For architects, ownership of the design rests with them and fellow professionals; for the aid world, engaging beneficiaries through sharing decisions is paramount.

Good post-disaster shelter interventions engage those affected in solving their own problems. When this doesn't happen, the results can be painful. As your article notes, Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation employed high-profile architects to produce "funky housing types" in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but was criticised for "transplanting alien architecture into a context where it wasn't called for".

Too many aid-delivered shelter programmes have lacked genuine participation by affected people, and as a consequence have been poorly designed and wrongly located. Architects need to be taught this stuff if they are to be relevant in places where disasters like this happen.

Take Haiti, and now Chile. The need is immense and the issues extremely complex. As your article states: "Natural and man-made disasters have created similar circumstances around the world, where homes, schools, hospitals, and other structures are needed quickly and cheaply." Yet before the earthquake some 75% of Haiti's population was already poor. This disaster was anything but natural. Buildings fell down because of poor maintenance, lack of planning, and mismanagement. As Salvano Briceno of the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction stated: "It's poverty that is at the core of these disasters."

Reconstruction in places where disasters are caused more by poverty than natural phenomena involves building back what can't be seen as much as what can. I agree with Robin Cross of Article 25, the UK's leading architectural aid charity, who says: "You need to pick up those [social and economic] threads and build a new Haiti around them."

Some architects may argue that to take this on board is too intractable and is beyond their remit. But this is the nature of the beast, and they cannot afford to ignore it. Architects must evolve to address the radically different circumstances for which they were trained.

Beyond the groundbreaking work of Architecture For Humanity and of Article 25 to which you refer, architects need to move beyond their traditional role of designers of buildings in places of relative certainty, to become facilitators of building processes that involve people in places of uncertainty and rapid change. Without this change, architects will remain on the margins of humanitarian response.

Chile is one of South America's richest, best-organised countries and many of its homes and offices were built to be earthquake resistant

Chile's earthquake was many times more powerful than the one that devastated Haiti earlier this year but caused only a small fraction of the casualties, thanks to geological luck and the country's preparation for such a disaster.

Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake was a "megathrust" which unleashed about 50 gigatons of energy, but it was centered offshore and about 21 miles underground, dissipating its force by the time it reached towns and cities.

In contrast, the 7-magnitude quake that struck Port-au-Prince on January 12 was much shallower – about eight miles deep – and right on the edge of a city where 3 million people lived.

Eight Haitian towns and cities suffered "violent" to "extreme" shaking, whereas Chilean urban areas did not suffer more than "severe" shaking: still horrible, but a let-off.

The other reason Chile was counting its dead in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousand was that this is one of South America's richest, best-organised countries. It has long experience of dealing with earthquakes.

Seismic activity is common along its Andean ridge. In 1960 it suffered one of the strongest quakes on record. Saturday's was the third with a magnitude greater than 8.7.

Homes and offices are built to sway with seismic waves rather than resist them. "When you look at the architecture in Chile, you see buildings that have damage, but not the complete pancaking that you've got in Haiti," said Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity.

Sinclair said Chilean architects have built thousands of low-income houses to be earthquake resistant. It is required by blueprints and building codes.

Chileans may still ask themselves if they did enough to prepare. In Concepcion, one of the hardest hit places, many houses made of adobe crumbled, as did a recent 15-storey apartment block. The university caught fire and gas and power lines snapped. Many streets were littered with rubble and, just as in Port-au-Prince, inmates escaped from a damaged prison.

In Santiago, the capital, large sections of the renovated airport's roof caved in. About 1.5 million Chileans were affected and 500,000 homes severely damaged. In some places rescuers complained of lack of fuel for equipment.

Even with damage estimated at $15bn-$30bn (£9.8-19.6bn), and airports, motorways and bridges shut, the state responded swiftly. "The fact that the president [Michelle Bachelet] was out giving minute-to-minute reports a few hours after the quake in the middle of the night gives you an indication of their disaster response," said Sinclair.