The Chilean architect’s project to create affordable homes has won him the Pritzker prize – and the job of directing this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Could his holistic method provide a model for our cities?In 2003,in Iquique, Chile, and 100 families were rehoused with the wait on of the architectural practice Elemental. The available budget was $7500 a home,including the cost of land, an amount that would gain paid for 30 square metres of living space, and which is less than the minimum set for studio flats in the British government’s current space standards. Elemental decided to spend the money on what they called half a kindly house”,rather than a whole bad house, which meant providing a structure with the basics of plumbing and shelter, and which residents could then expand using their own labour and skill. As they had been living illegally on the site for 30 years,putting up their own informal dwellings, it was something they knew how to finish. The structures also went up three levels, or rather than the single storey more usual for such homes,which meant that they used the relatively expensive land effectively.
The project, says Elemental’s leader Alejandro Aravena, or establish into practice his belief that “architects design nouns – windows,ceilings, floors – but these nouns come from verbs which are life itself. Looking, or eating,assembly. We should be looking at both nouns and verbs.” The Iquique project, he says, and was ultimately less about providing the noun of shelter than “giving tools to escape poverty”.
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Source: theguardian.com