Elemental

Alejandro Aravena. Elemental. 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor and a two storey apartment above. The empty slot between the white cores are meant to be built into, shown here in a yellow example. 

Elemental, the Chilean architectural practice of Alejandro Aravena, developed a housing model in the early 2000s where, using government funds, the expensive parts of site development and of a house are built first: site services, then in each house, bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, party walls and roof.  This is the first half.  The second half is eventually built into the space between these cores.  In the Santa Catarina project above, there are 70 units on .6ha; the area is middle class, not a slum, and half the project was intended to be self-built according to means, opportunity and needs.
 
Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people.  It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build a safe structure, a kitchen and bathroom, and then to connect them to a utilities infrastructure.  Elemental SA was, perhaps still is, in a partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company, to design projects with social impact through 'the development of complex initiatives'.  To get projects such as these in place requires more than a brilliant idea, it requires partners at all levels of urban development.  The city is their workshop.  

Formally built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention.  In theory, Elemental's model allows the best from both: safe building standards and people's participation in their own dwellings. 

However, in 2016 Aravena was given the Pritzker prize for Elemental’s work. A sort of critical hell broke loose.

Iquique, Chile. A concrete frame, with kitchen, bathroom and a roof (left), allows families to fill in the gaps. photograph: Cristobal Palma

Aravena’s crime it seems was to be photogenic with interesting hair, and allegedly to aspire to starchitect status, that stupid moniker conferred by receiving a Pritzker for a certain kind of new millenium architect. Some said it was the Pritzker getting a social conscience, others that it was a reward for a particular kind of neo-liberalism that did not change the inequities within society, but rather confirmed them.

As I understand Elemental the state, however that is construed, assumes responsibility for infrastructural development: site acquisition, preparation and servicing. Either the state or a city, or a developer, or a consortium, avails itself of available housing grants and subsidies and builds precisely what that amount of money/unit will cover. In Iquique, it is half a three-storey house. The other half of the house, the void beside the half a house, can be built into over time, adding additional rooms, porches and extended services. It isn’t clear whether the units can be bought, or are rented, or leased; subsidised or market-valued, but as Elemental projects have covered a range of economic brackets from an alternative to barrios to middle-income environmentally displaced communities to company towns, the acquisition of units must be conditional on who actually has developed the project and if it is a benign relationship.

The critics of this plan say it encourages neo-liberal accumulation and commodification of housing. It isn’t the provision of housing as a basic human right, but rather promotes acquisition of property within a subsidised market model. Thus goes the argument; doesn’t make a lot of sense as architectural critique to me, unless we extend the scope of architecture to include ownership of production.

Aravena takes a much older form of housing based on aggregation of resources, rooms and provisional structures that become permanent over time, essentially the barrio model, and exploits the desire of cities, of resource extraction companies and states to demonstrate their twenty-first century humanitarian ambitions. Unregulated housing, identified with barrios, ghettos and gangs, is uncontrolled and from which revenue cannot be extracted. If an accretive model is adopted by corporate entities, value, eventually, will rebound upon them.

Elemental project working drawings are published, full scale, on its website, downloadable at high resolution, for free:

Elemental, Santa Catarina: Monterrey Incremental Housing Project, 70 units, 2008-2009. Plans above, built houses below.

Almost twenty years on, and with a severe lack of affordable housing in the affluent first world, such schemes are undoubtedly attractive. Developed in and for what was once considered the third world, they run into a major stumbling block in societies where house type and social identity are deeply interlinked. Our North American cities are full of apartment blocks and row housing, neither of which express individuality at the unit level. It is the desire to project one’s individual presence that consigns apartments and condo units to mere stepping stones in the acquisition of the single family house on a single lot, zoned R-1, where one is, supposedly, free to repaint, to change, to rebuild, make additions, to be oneself. The psychology of housing and class cannot be addressed by either logic or economical arguments as to efficiency of resources. Exceptional cities such as New York, or Montreal, have generations of apartment buildings housing generations of families who have never aspired to an R-1 lot. And there are perhaps instances of such verticality in all our cities, but they are often limited. The perception is that a monocultural life in an apartment block is a short-term life for the cash-strapped, the elderly, young singles and people without children or pets.

Somehow this is the hurdle that must be overcome first: that small, hyper-efficient, inexpensive pre-fabricated housing is not a negative, not the architectural equivalent of a cardboard box, but can actually be affordable and permanent and have opportunities: a serviced site, whether on the ground or in a larger building, that one can make one’s own. Architects are stylists for political, social, cultural and economic movements. We don’t change society, we make change both palatable and desirable. We design enabling systems, which is what Alejandro Aravena did with his Elemental works.