Credit: Serge Salat, Urban Morphology Institute, based on material produced by ELEMENTAL.

Four projects designed by Alejandro Aravena, Elemental, will be used to craft a reading on how to implement an incremental approach to housing projects, with examples taken from Chile and Mexico. Although sharing similar principles, they display diverse scale and typological features of interventions. The project in Lo Barnechea dealt with an urban tissue filled with contrasts. The project in Quinta Monroy dealt with what was at the time, the last informal settlement in the centre of Iquique, Santiago de Chile. The Villa Verde housing project, in Constitución proposes row houses, where residents build a minor part incrementally. Finally, the Monterrey housing project dealt with high prices of housing in Mexico, making very difficult for low-income families to have access to an adequate dwelling. All these projects deal with the issue of house affordability in different context and by employing different planning and design strategies.

Lo Barnechea Neighborhood, Santiago

The commune of Lo Barnechea, northeast of Santiago, is one of the most expensive areas in the city. However, its urban tissue is filled with contrasts, because there are areas with luxury homes and also dense zones of social housing, as well as self-built settlements. These dwellings, raised in two phases, were developed to rehouse a large number of families living in two large informal settlements, creating a complex of 363 houses.

As in previous cases, the project’s premise was to ensure that the families could stay in their usual area of residence, close to their workplaces and schools, avoiding the risks of social exclusion. The construction is organized around collective patios for an average of twenty houses, which create a territorial association between public and private space, something essential in this type of residential project. To make the best use of land and avoid overcrowding, the house prototype proposed goes up three heights and can be extended inwards. Though starting out from a very basic original situation, each unit can eventually include a living-dining room, two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, and finally the main bedroom on the third floor.

Elevations and courtyard type of Colonia Lo Barnechea, Santiago. Source: ELEMENTAL

Quinta Monroy housing, Iquique

Quinta Monroy was, at least when the project was undertaken, the last informal settlement in the center of Iquique, a city in the Chilean desert, 1,500 kilometers north of Santiago. The poor living conditions favored its inclusion in a government program to replace the settlement with 93 housing units for the families that occupied it. The first essential decision of the project was to stay on the same terrain – which cost three times more than the land usually assigned to social housing –, to avoid having to move those already living there to the periphery, where land is cheap but the location can lead to marginality and does not favor the increase in property value.

Furthermore, the subsidy of 7,500 USD for each family allowed building, at best, 36 square meters, half of the area of a standard middle-class house. The project addresses these issues with a typology that, making an efficient use of the land, permits extending the houses in a controlled way to avoid overcrowding and promotes self-build processes. Families are given half of a good house equipped with quality services, and they are offered technical support to carry out the extensions on their own.

Viviendas Quinta Monroy, Iquique. Source: ELEMENTAL. © Cristóbal Palma

Villa Verde housing, Constitución

Within a plan to support its workers, the forestry company Arauco decided to favor their access to a permanent residence within the framework of Chile’s housing policy. There were more resources available for this project, as well as higher than average building standards, so this brought a perfect opportunity to further develop the incremental principles that had been successfully tested in previous projects, but with a more ambitious initial and final scenario.

The project proposes row houses with two floors, where the user receives half of the buildable volume with basic, high-quality interior finishes. The initial area in each unit is 57 square meters, reaching up to 85 square meters after completing the extensions. The main advantage in this case is that the structure of the house is delivered almost complete for the final state of the houses (shared party walls, pitched roof, lower slab and beams for the slab of the first floor), so the residents themselves only have to build one slab and two outer walls. Furthermore, after the positive experiences of previous participatory projects, here too the owners were invited to workshops about how to carry out the extensions.

Viviendas Villa Verde, Constitución. Source: ELEMENTAL.

Monterrey housing

The high prices of housing in Mexico make it very difficult for low-income families to have access to an adequate dwelling. Encouraged by the previous experiences in Chile, the IVNL (housing institute of Nuevo León) decided to commission Elemental to build a project of 70 housing units in the city of Monterrey, whose metropolitan area is the country’s third largest.

The residential complex takes up a rectangular block, with a row of housing on each front surrounding a courtyard, and another row letting an avenue go through. This arrangement permits an efficient use of the land and maintains an appropriate urban scale. Here, again, most of the budget is devoted to buying a terrain in a central location, and only 20% goes to the construction of houses, which are an improved version of the Quinta Monroy dwellings.

As these, they are also organized as a ground level apartment and an upper duplex, but with slightly larger surfaces that can reach middle-class standards after each extension. The construction optimizes the type used in Santiago de Chile by completely covering the whole buildable volume, so the users don’t have to complete the roofing if undertaking an extension later on.