This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2004/Winter 2005, Number 21.

To order this issue or a subscription, visit the HDM homepage at <http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/hdm>. 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.

ELEMENTAL
Building Innovative Social Housing in Chile by

Alejandro Aravena

moments in the history of social housing. The rst came in 1927, when, in the 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 decit came to an end. We are planning to write the third chapter of this story by again bringing the best architects to the most difcult of the architectural issues: extremely low cost housing that can be a real means to overcoming poverty. ELEMENTAL, based at the Universidad Catlica de Chiles 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 identied the conditions required to guarantee a successful way to invest monW eissenhofsiedlung

There have been perhaps two major

ey in social housing, and we want to prove our point under real circumstances. Chile already knows how to make efcient 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 governments social housing program will invest ten billion dollars in the next fteen 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 conguration. Let me give you an example. 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 Catlica architecture school), and I, together with Jorge Silvetti, GSDs Nelson Robinson

On Public Service
1
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

ON PUBLIC SERVICE

ELEMENTAL

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 policyVivienda 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 nancial 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-ve to thirty square meters of built space.1 This means that the beneciaries 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 difcult 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. 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 initially tends to look for land that costs 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 typethe isolated house in the middle of a lot. This not only makes a very inefcient 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 to disappear, eaten by owners construction, incapable of dening a decent urban space. The second expense-lowering method we observe is trying to be more efcient in the use of the land, using a more compressed architectural type: the row house with two oors. 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 efciency, is overcrowding. Finally, we observe buildings constructed high. 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 rst 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 nally 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 homeowners initiativeno matter how much money, time, and energy he or she spendswould 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 difcult 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 eld are skeptical about innovations), and we had to follow the same rules everybody followed. In this context, a group of professors from the Harvard Design School, the Faculty of Architecture and the Program of Policies of the Universidad Catlica de Chile, the Housing Ministry of Chile, and Harvards David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies, along with some important Chilean construction companies (Pizarreo Companies, Cements Bo-Bo, 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 difculty 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). 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 Fernndez-Galiano, Rafael Moneo, and Jorge Silvetti, the latFA L L 2 0 0 4 / W I N T E R 2 0 0 5

H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

ON PUBLIC SERVICE

ELEMENTAL

, Harvard Magazine

H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

FA L L 2 0 0 4 / W I N T E R 2 0 0 5

2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

ter 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 2005 to initiate working sessions that will incorporate the communities beneting from the design process, as well as local building companies, architects, and engineers. ELEMENTAL has managed in its rst 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 condence that the government of Chile and the different partner institutions have put into the initiative is a good signwe might reafrm the bridging roll of the university in Chiles development and make a difference for many impoverished people.

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 becomes 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 signicant element of this housing effort is that it supports ONE EXAMPLE IN THE DESERT its residents future self-dened design and building and thus also their sense of Commissioned by the Chilean governpride and ownership. This, together with ments Chile-Barrio Program, the the implications of its design operaTALLER de CHILE (of which I am a member) was asked to developed a proj- tionsextended families living in collecect for Quinta Monroy in Iquique, a city tive spaces, urban centrality, and the in the Chilean desert, a project that could creation of public spacesmight make be considered a prototype for the ELE- out of housing not an aim in itself but a tool for overcoming poverty . . . for famiMENTAL Initiative. The TALLERs brief was to provide a lies, but also for Chile. housing solution to settle the 100 families that for thirty years had illegally oc- N O T E S 1. Associate GSD faculty members Mnica Ponce de cupied a .5 hectare site in the core of principals in the rm ofce Iquique. Our rst task was to nd a new Len and Nader Tehrani,the ELEMENTAL projects. dA, are designing one of way of looking at the problem, shifting Tehrani describes the Rubiks cube constraints: deour mindset from the scale of the best tailed specications of space . . . materials, and even how the layouts were meant to perform. Given budgets possible $7,500 building multiplied 100 lower than low, he says, the design had to focus on times to the scale of the best possible that housing requires $750,000 building capable of expanding the most fundamental thingscommunity. John privacy, collective space, and and accommodating 100 families. Rosenberg, Tying Knots: Glimpsing Global Harvard The units able to grow in a building , MayJune 2004. in Chile are those on the ground, which can expand horizontally, and those on top oors, which can expand vertically. So we A L E J A N D R O A R A V E N A is Visiting Design Critic at the GSD and has an independent profesworked on a building that had just a sional practice in Chile. More information on ground and top oor. We had to bear in ELEMENTAL is available at mind that 60% of each units volume <www.elementalchile.org>. would eventually be self-built and therefore was unknown to us in its particulars.