Alexandro Aravena - Elemental

Elemental.

This is a picture of their office, it is located in chile.

The elemental company was founded in 2005. This agency is composed of 25 people. Alejendro Aravena is the director. It itself known through social housing projects, but also the reconstructions of damaged cities. When constructing a building here is what they asle  themselves:

“Physically shaking a building, everything that was not strictly necessary falls. So why wait for the earthquake? Can’t we submit design to a mental force that has taken out everything that is not strictly necessary?” 

Quinta Monroy

The project aims to house 100 families already living in the area. They had been living there illegally for 30 years. The site has a surface of 5000 m². It is located in the center of Iquique, a city in the Chilean desert. The project receives a public subsidy of $ 7,500 per family. The budget included land, infrastructure and architecture. The problem of this site is that in theory it can only accommodate 30 families. It was necessary to find a solution allowing to lodge them all without making skyscrapers, but rather create houses that can evolve over time.

They think that social housing should be considered an investment and not an expense. It was necessary to ensure that social housing, does not lose its values ​​On the contrary, it should be able to increase over time The creation of a physical space for the "large family" has proved to be a key element in the economic take-off of a poor family. Between private space and public space, we have introduced the collective space, made up of about twenty families. The collective space is a level of intermediary association that makes it possible to survive in fragile social conditions.

To conclude, in this social housing project, they implemented for the first time one of their key ideas: the concept of "additional housing". Given a tiny budget, instead of designing townhouses or small single-family houses, they proposed to build a "half-house" for the same cost, providing a basic house with sanitary equipment. needed and two rooms for a total floor area of 40 square meters.With this framework, families took over to build the rest of the house after saving enough money, and they gradually changed housing to move from low-end social housing to more attractive housing.

The project is finish in 2004. There created 3 other projects in the same concept.

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