Half A House Builds A Whole Community: Elemental’s

Controversial Social Housing

 07:00 - 24 October, 2016

 by Ariana Zilliacus
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Half A House Builds A Whole Community: Elemental’s Controversial Social Housing

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Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile by Elemental. Image via 99 Percent Invisible

In Chile, a middle-class family may inhabit a house of around 80 square meters, whereas a low-
income family might be lucky enough to inhabit 40 square meters. They can’t afford a large
“good” house, and are henceforth often left with smaller homes or building blocks; but why not
give them half a “good” house, instead of a finished small house? In the 1970s a professor by the
name John F.C. Turner, teaching at a new masters program at MIT called “Urban Settlement
Design In Developing Countries”, developed an idea surrounding the concept that people can
build for themselves. 99% Invisible has covered a story, produced by Sam Greenspan, on how
this idea has evolved, and what it has turned into: Half A House.

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Turner’s premise was that housing should be conceived of as an on-going project. This
eventually turned into incremental building, inspiring architect and incremental housing expert,
George Gattoni. Gattoni was attempting to solve the problem of urban migration, resulting in
squatting and huge housing deficits. Gattoni’s struggle laid in making low-income houses
affordable, and incremental building was the answer. He has been involved in spreading
incremental building projects all over the world, raising awareness of its existence in the
architectural world.

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 Villa Verde
build-out in progress. Image via 99 Percent Invisible
Elemental, led by Alejandro Aravena, evolved this idea when commissioned to draw up a new
master plan for Constitución, Chile, after it was hit by an earthquake of magnitude 8.8; the
second largest in the world during the last 50 years, killing over 500 people and destroying 80%
of the buildings in the city. Elemental had already experimented with unfinished low-income
houses in Iquique, Chile, which were to be built at $7,500 per unit, for 100 families. The future
inhabitants threatened even the proposal of a housing block with a hunger strike, but building
individual houses would simply cost too much. Instead, Elemental provided the residents with
just enough to meet the Chilean legal requirements for low-income housing, allowing them to
expand the rest.

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Quinta Monroy project in Iquique, Chile by Elemental. Image via 99 Percent Invisible
In Constitución, the plans for Villa Verde, an entire area populated by two-storey half houses, the
visual design of the buildings are different, but the concept is the same; half of the houses are
identical and the other halves are completely unique. The first floor of the finished half is made
up of unfinished concrete floors, and the second is covered in unfinished plywood. There is only
one sink in the kitchen, with no other appliances, but the house is cheap, practical and well
insulated. Everything that families wouldn’t have an easy time building alone, such as concrete
foundations, plumbing, and electricity, has been finished for them. The Chilean government pays
for roads, drainage, sewage, garbage collection, busses and any other necessary infrastructure, to
focus on building a good community. Residents just have to provide their time, labor and any
extra materials.

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Dronve view of Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile by Elemental. Image via 99 Percent Invisible
Residents can take part in building workshops facilitated by Elemental, and every house comes
with a manual covering possible ways to expand using standard building materials, avoiding the
need for anyone to buy expensive custom resources. The vision is that residents end up with a
much more pleasant house than what they could have built completely on their own or received
from ordinary state funding. Juan Ignacio Cerda, one of Elemental’s principal architects, said
that even if money were not an issue, the firm would build the same homes. Any extra funding
would go into improving the surrounding space and uplifting the neighborhood, embodying the
firm’s social approach.

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 Villa Verde
expansion under construction. Image via 99 Percent Invisible
Born from the scarcity of resources in Chile, Elemental has produced low-income houses that are
won’t be destroyed in an earthquake or flood, and feel safe for the people who live there. Of
course, not everyone is so enthusiastic about building their own house, and some are not so
satisfied with Elemental’s contractors, but on the whole, the concept seems to be succeeding in
using “scarcity as a tool”. This has also been recognized by the architectural
community; Alejandro Aravena won the Pritzker Prize in 2016, for epitomizing “the revival of a
more socially engaged architect…fighting for a better urban environment for all.” Contrary to
what our intuition may tell us, the podcast ends by summarizing that “building half a house
might just be the best way to make a community whole.” Oddly enough, this appears to be true.

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena

wins 2016 Pritzker prize
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Architecture
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 Social housing visionary, who engaged residents in designing their own
homes, urges architects to address issues of poverty, pollution and
segregation

 Designs for life: Alejandro Aravena’s best buildings – in pictures

Oliver Wainwright

@ollywainwright
Wed 13 Jan 2016 14.33 GMTLast modified on Fri 11 May 2018 13.12 BST

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In Iquique, Chile, Aravena provided a concrete frame, with kitchen, bathroom

and a roof (left), which were designed to allow families to fill in the gaps
(right). Photograph: Cristobal Palma

The radical Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, known for his pioneering social
housing projects in Latin America, has been named as the winner of the 2016 Pritzker
prize, the highest accolade in architecture.

The 48-year-old, who is also the curator of this year’s Venice ArchitectureBiennale, has
made a name for himself over the past decade with projects that reinvent low-cost
housing and engage residents in the design of their own homes. It is a refreshing choice
for the Pritzker, usually awarded to later-career architects whose portfolios brim with
grand cultural monuments.

Alejandro Aravena: architect, equaliser, el

visionario
Read more

Announcing the news, Tom Pritzker, whose father founded the prize in 1979, said
Aravena’s work “gives economic opportunity to the less privileged, mitigates the effects
of natural disasters, reduces energy consumption, and provides welcoming public space
… He shows how architecture at its best can improve people’s lives.”

Aravena and his architecture practice, Elemental, first came to international attention in
2004 with a project that redefined the economics of social housing. The challenge was to
rehouse 100 families who had been squatting illegally on half a hectare of land in the
centre of Iquique in northern Chile. The government’s housing subsidy of US$7,500
(£5,200) per family was nowhere near enough to buy the land and build new homes,
particularity on such a valuable site. The usual solution would have been to relocate the
residents to the outer suburbs, cutting them off from their families, friends and jobs.

“If there wasn’t the money to build everyone a good house,” said Aravena, on the
telephone from his studio in Santiago, “we thought: why not build everyone half a good
house – and let them finish the rest themselves.”
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Top: Interior of a house in Iquique financed with public money and, bottom, developed
by residents. Photograph: Tadeuz Jalocha
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Elemental’s terraced houses provided a basic concrete frame, complete with kitchen,
bathroom and a roof, allowing families to fill in the gaps, and stamp their own identity
on their homes in the process. The result was a far cry from the identikit slabs of nearby
social housing blocks. The value of the properties has since increased five-fold, while the
model has been rolled out in different forms on other sites in Chile and Mexico involving
2,500 homes.
The rebuilding of Chile's Constitución: how a 'dead
city' was brought back to life
Read more

Aravena is one of a number of young Chilean architects coming to international

prominence – along with Serpentine pavilion architect Smiljan Radic, Mathias Klotz
and Pezo von Ellrichshausen – a flowering that Aravena partly attributes to scarce
resources. “The toughness of the circumstances can work as a useful filter against
arbitrariness,” he says. “This environment of scarcity stops you from doing things that
are not strictly necessary – whereas abundance can sometimes lead to a culture of doing
things just because you can.”

Trained at Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago, Aravena’s first project was a new
mathematics faculty for his alma mater, built in 1998. A medical school followed, then
the refurbishment of the architecture school, along with a classroom tower
and innovation centre, which stands on the Santiago skyline as a startling stack of
monolithic concrete blocks.

While Aravena has built an impressive portfolio of buildings, it is the bigger strategic
questions that really drive his work, and for which he has been awarded the Pritzker.
The judges say he “epitomises the revival of a more socially engaged architect” and gives
the profession “a new dimension”.

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The medical school at the Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago. Photograph: Roland
Halbe
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Elemental is an partnership between a group of architects, a university and the country’s

national oil company, Copec – which provided the initial funding. This Robin Hood
structure runs throughout Elemental’s work, split three ways between social housing,
urban planning and more lucrative commercial contracts. Projects like a new
headquarters for pharmaceuticals giant Novartis in Shanghai help to subsidise the more
public work, which includes a post-tsunami reconstruction plan for the city of
Constitución.

Pritzker prize 2016: Alejandro Aravena's designs

for life – in pictures

Aravena’s team was charged with devising plans for everything from new housing and
public buildings to tsunami mitigation and energy infrastructure in just 100 days. They
began by building an “open house” in the city’s main square, a drop-in centre where
people could come to discuss and contribute to evolving plans. Dolores Chamorro, a 78-
year-old local resident who has lived through a good number of Chilean earth tremors,
said their approach was a refreshing change. “I went to every meeting,” she told the
Guardian. “It was fantastic having these young architects come in to really make us
think about the kind of city we wanted.”

As poster boy for a more critical model of architecture practice, Aravena intends to use
his Venice Biennale – titled Reporting from the Front – to raise the volume of debate
around global urbanisation. “We will have to house a new city of 1 million people per
week over the next 15 years, using resources of just $10,000 per family,” he says.
“One of the biggest mistakes that architects make is that they tend to deal with problems
that only interest other architects,” he adds. “The biggest challenge is to engage with the
important non-architectural issues – poverty, pollution, congestion, segregation – and
apply our specific knowledge. It’s not enough to raise awareness. I want people to leave
with more tools. We must share the challenges so we are aware of the coming battles.”

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