the INCREMENTAL house

Buildings change The topography poses interesting challenges Materials palette is quite rich Buildings added piece by piece Angles Quebrada Marquez Valparaiso is one of those spectacular places that just kind of catches you. You feel the history of the place with the texture and materials of the buildings, as the newly brightly painted buildings sit next to the old rusting homes, generating a new and changing palette of material and color. Everything just feels old here, but still very much alive. New interventions sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but everything feels like it has been adapted and changed over time. The challenges of building a city on steep slopes is evident and creates some amazing visual dynamics as the chaos of the power lines juxtaposes nicely next to the chaos of the hillsides. One project, Quebrada Marquez is a large housing project set on a hillside. The approach was to directly challenge the hillside by inserting a massive horizontal shif...

The Unidad Vecinal Portales is a massive housing complex just north of the main bus terminal. I don’t know the exact number of units, but it must approach 1000. It is quite a striking modernist project designed in 1950 by B.V.C.H. (Bresciani, Valdés, Castillo y Huidobro) and was constructed between 1952 and 1956. It has quite a striking variety of buildings, all originally connected through broad walkways and interior streets. In the larger blocks, housing is a variety of one and two story units. In between the blocks are units, designed like rowhouses. Each of these have a front and backyard. These were originally placed under a lot of the walkways, but over the years, these walkways have been closed off and used to create pitched roofs over the homes. It is a very strange experience to be walking along and see the walkway in front of you end in someone’s roof. One of the residents told me that it was because young kids would hang out all night being rowdy and the only wa...

While in Antofogasta, I visited a project called Salar de Carmen. It was designed by Mario Perez de Arce and Jaime Besa in 1959 and encompassed 850 homes. It was very much in the modernist tradition and while originally was a very striking project, has since been transformed into an unrecognizable project, almost blending in with the vernacular of the surrounding neighborhoods. The original design in 1961 1961 and 2008 Additions and Transformations Each of these corners were originally the same design A typical street elevation showing the variety, transformation and progress of the fabric Context today

Duplexes with expansion zones Lo Espejo was the second completed ELEMENTAL project. The community was living in a campamento (squatted and shabby housing of minimal materials) near the location of the new project in Santiago. Once again, ELEMENTAL proposed building half the house, and allowing a Typical housing in the neighborhood good bit of freedom for customization and such. After working closely with the community, ELEMENTAL proposed two schemes and the community agreed and selected one. Because Santiago has a much rainier climate, the roof over the entire project had to be built first. This project differed with Quinta Monroy in the fact that the government essentially funded the additions, and the homes were able to be completely built out at the beginning. Johana, in front of her ´perfect´house I spoke with Johana, one of the community leaders. After taking the bus all over town and finally finding the project, I was early and decided to draw a bit and wander arou...

Varying facades 5 years later Before and after facades on Galvanrino St. Elevation on Pedro Prado. This project served as one of the inspirations for my initial proposal on incremental housing. By looking at how architects could play a significant role in helping people improve their housing without taking away their agency, the architectural group ELEMENTAL, in conjunction with the Chilean government, has contributed significantly to the discourse of social housing. The first project in Iquique, on a site called Quinta Monroy explored the question of how to provide a basic quality house, for only $7,500. Their answer was to provide half of the house. And if only half, which half would it be? Working closely with a community of squatters that had lived precariously on an urban site, the architects developed a set of rules, by which people could still have a lot of capacity to live their lives and have their homes express that. The rules ensured that each unit...