Back Issue Rising Ambitions, Expanding Terrain Number 21, Fall 2004/Winter 2005

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ELEMENTAL

Building Innovative Social Housing in Chile, by Alejandro Aravena

There have been perhaps two major moments in the history of social housing. The first came in 1927, when, in the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, the best architects at the time made built contributions to try to solve the problem of low-cost housing. The second came in 1970, after the Previ-Lima project, when attempts of avant-garde architects to help overcome a housing deficit came to an end. We are planning to write the third chapter of this story by again bringing the best architects to the most difficult of the architectural issues: extremely low cost housing that can be a real means to overcoming poverty.

ELEMENTAL, based at the Universidad Católica de Chile's school of architecture and supported by a Chilean government grant and by the Harvard Design School, is an initiative that will build seven exemplary projects of around 200 units each throughout Chile, bringing together the best practices in construction and engineering, social work and architecture, and aiming to offer a concrete contribution to housing for the poor.

Why? Because we in ELEMENTAL have identified the conditions required to guarantee a successful way to invest money in social housing, and we want to prove our point under real circumstances. Chile already knows how to make efficient housing policies. The problem is that the way we spend the money for housing is closer to the way we buy cars than the way we buy houses. When we buy a house, we expect it to increase in value over time. This is not the case with social housing; every day these houses, like cars, are worth less than their original value. For a poor family, the money spent in a house will be by far the biggest investment of their lives and something they hope to leave to their children. The government's social housing program will invest ten billion dollars in the next fifteen years. ELEMENTAL wants to make sure that houses and neighborhoods will increase in value, and that depends on their design. ELEMENTAL is not about making more beautiful houses, but about being intelligent in their configuration. Let me give you an example.

“If we could synthesize this into an equation, both the fundamental goals of any housing policy and the goals of this new VSDsD policy, would be to design neighborhoods made out of good quality, expandable housing units well located in cities, able to develop harmoniously over time, and structurally safe-all for US $7,500 per family.”

In March 2001, the founders of ELEMENTAL, Andres Iacobelli, MPA '01, Pablo Allard, MAU' 99, (who runs the undergraduate cities, landscape, and environmental studies unit at the Católica architecture school), and I, together with Jorge Silvetti, GSD's Nelson Robinson Jr. Professor of Architecture, went to meet the Chilean Minister of Housing, Jaime Ravinet, to tell him of our interest in contributing ideas and projects to alleviate the social housing problem. He said that the government was about to begin a new housing policy—Vivienda Social Dinamica sin deuda (Dynamic, without Debt, Social Housing or VSDsD)—so that any contribution related to that policy would be useful. This policy favors people in extreme need: those without the capacity to pay back a loan or without access to financial credit. Every family receives a subsidy of a US$7,500 voucher. Considering the current values in the Chilean building industry, this low budget allows for just twenty-five to thirty square meters of built space.(1) This means that the beneficiaries have to, on their own, build what is required to transform the initial housing into a real dwelling, without later having to pay back anything.

What problems might either the current or this new housing policy produce? In housing for the poor there are three main architectural problems that I will discuss below. We have enough information about the social problems they have produced so that we are in a position to correct those. But this new policy introduces new questions into the already difficult equation of low-cost housing that the known building types are unable to answer, so we need to sharply formulate these new conditions.

How does the market now operate? One family dwells on one lot. What we get as a consequence are isolated houses in the middle of lots. (Fig.1) Two major problems stem from having this: First, since the subsidy (the old one or the new one of $7,500) has to pay for the land, the infrastructure, and the house itself, the building market tends to look first for land that cost as little as possible. Thus lots tend to be at the periphery of the cities, far from the opportunities of work, education, transportation, health facilities, and so on that might help families overcome poverty, and this placement creates belts of resentment and violence.

After lowest cost lots, the natural next step is to spend as little as possible on the building, using the most inexpensive architectural type—the isolated house in the middle of a lot. This not only makes a very inefficient use of the land, it also enlarges urban sprawl and poverty belts, and cannot guarantee an acceptable urban environment after homeowners expand their houses. A single volume in the middle of a lot after a while tends disappear, “eaten” by owners' construction, incapable of defining a decent urban space.

The second expense-lowering method we observe is trying to be more efficient in the use of the land, using a more “compressed” architectural type: the row house with two floors. (Fig.2) The problem with this type is not only that, because we are talking of forty square meter (400 square feet) houses, compression results in three- to four-meter-wide housing units (the width of one room), but also that we get three- to four-meter-wide lots so that whenever a family wants to add a new room, it blocks access to light and ventilation in its other rooms. What we get then, instead of efficiency, is overcrowding.

Finally, we observe buildings constructed high. (Fig.3). This is the worst type in every possible way, but for “Dynamic Social Housing,” it is not even a possibility, since it blocks any possible expansion.

So the first goal of a progressive housing project should be to be able pay for sites that are better located within the network of opportunities in cities. The second is to develop an architectural type that, by being positioned strategically in the lot, can have some role in the future in guaranteeing the quality of urban space. That architectural type should also allow easy and safe building of expansions. And finally the design of every house should consider the best possible scenarios for those expansions. A good design (and therefore a good public policy) should provide for all those important elements that any individual homeowner's initiative-no matter how much money, time, and energy he or she spends-would never be able to produce.

If we could synthesize this into an equation, both the fundamental goals of any housing policy and the goals of this new VSDsD policy would be to design neighborhoods made out of good quality, expandable housing units well located in cities, able to develop harmoniously over time, and structurally safe—all for US $7,500 per family.

We knew that any contribution to this extremely difficult equation had to have at least two conditions: we had to prove our designs by building them (designs on paper or screens are too disembodied to be understood by most people, and the powerful players in this field are skeptical about innovations) and we had to follow the same rules everybody followed.

In this context, a group of professors from the GSD, the Faculty of Architecture and the Program of Policies of the Universidad Católica de Chile, the Housing Ministry of Chile, and Harvard's David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies, along with some important Chilean construction companies (Pizarreño Companies, Cements Bío-Bío, and Homestore) and social institutions, began to develop the Fondef/CONICYT project “ELEMENTAL: Initiative to Innovate and to Construct Seven Sets of Housing of Very Low Cost in Chile.”

The difficulty of our equation made us treat the problem from three different entry points: the best possible architectural design (having intelligence and precision in form), the best possible engineering and construction (using development and lab tests for new prefabricated components and seismic systems), and the best possible social and community work (offering pre- and post-construction guidance to residents).

“We had to bear in mind that 60% of each unit's volume would eventually be self-built and therefore was unknown to us in its particulars. The initial building had to therefore provide a supporting, unconstraining framework for impoverished construction.”

To get the best possible architecture, we organized an international competition for professionals and students that ended in November 2003, engaging more than 730 architectural teams from all over the world. The competition jury included Jaime Ravinet, Fernando Echeverria (president of the Chilean Building Chamber), Jose Ramon Ugarte (president of the Chilean Architects Association), and architects Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Luis Fernàndez-Galiano, Rafael Moneo, and Jorge Silvetti, the latter of whom acted as jury president. Authoring the seven winning proposals in each group are professionals and students from Iran, Venezuela, the United States, Uruguay, Spain, Holland, and Chile, among other countries. The winners will meet in Santiago in March 2004 to initiate working sessions that will incorporate the communities benefiting from the design process, as well as local building companies, architects, and engineers.

ELEMENTAL has managed in its first months to revitalize the issue of housing for the poor. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge will occur during the next months, when the proposed ideas must be constructed within the restrictions of the ELEMENTAL system. The confidence that the government of Chile and the different partner institutions have put into the initiative is a good sign—we might reaffirm the bridging roll of the university in Chile's development and make a difference for many impoverished people.

ONE EXAMPLE IN THE DESERT
Commissioned by the Chilean government's Chile-Barrio Program, the TALLER de CHILE (of which I am a member) was asked to developed a project for Quinta Monroy in Iquique, a city in the Chilean desert, a project that could be considered a prototype for the ELEMENTAL Initiative.

The TALLER's brief was to provide a housing solution to settle the 100 families that for thirty years had illegally occupied a .5 hectare site in the core of Iquique. Our first task was to find a new way of looking at the problem, shifting our mindset from the scale of the best possible $7,500 building multiplied 100 times to the scale of the best possible $750,000 building capable of expanding and accommodating 100 families.

The units able to grow in a building are those on the ground, which can expand horizontally, and those on top floors, which can expand vertically. So we worked on a building that had just a ground and top floor. We had to bear in mind that 60% of each unit's volume would eventually be self-built and therefore was unknown to us in its particulars. The initial building had to therefore provide a supporting, unconstraining framework for improvised construction.

Historically, social housing has been criticized for its monotony and repetitiveness (brought about by efforts to achieve economy) and thus for its inability to respond to the diversity and particular needs of families. In this case, however, monotony and any other factor that may support the 60% of construction that is unpredictable and yet-to-be become desirable. Viewed from this perspective, prefabrication and industrialization cease to be negative.

Finally, it is generally the case that when no one is prepared to take responsibility for a public space, it is the collective space (a common property with restricted access) that can successfully take urban living beyond the private realm and ensure its maintenance. Collective spaces work well at the scale of about twenty families.

Perhaps the most significant element of this housing effort is that it supports its residents' future self-defined design and building and thus also their sense of pride and ownership. This, together with the implications of its design operations-—extended families living in collective spaces, urban centrality, and the creation of public spaces—might make out of housing not an aim in itself but a tool for overcoming poverty . . . for families, but also for Chile.

NOTES

1. “Associate GSD faculty members Mónica Ponce de León and Nader Tehrani, principals in the firm office dA, are designing one of the ELEMENTAL projects. Tehrani describes the 'Rubik's cube' constraints: detailed specifications of space . . . materials, and even how the 'layouts were meant to perform.' Given budgets 'lower than low,' he says, the design had to focus on 'the most fundamental things that housing requires'—privacy, collective space, and community.” John Rosenberg, "Tying Knots: Glimpsing Global Harvard in Chile," Harvard Magazine, May-June 2004.