https://divisare.com/projects/280780-elemental-alejandro-aravena-lo-espejo
3 Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental project. circa 2015. 2 This was a well-reported project at the time, in the mid-2010s. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor, a two-storey apartment above with an empty slot between the apartments meant to be built into, when time and money permits. A 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico, used government funding for the expensive part of any development: access, roads, sewer systems, busses and other infrastructural elements necessary for a community; and for house services — plumbing, wiring, stairs, foundations, party walls and roof. This is the first half. The second half is occupation and the eventual building out of the space between these cores. 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 strong structure, a kitchen and bathroom, or to connect them to utilities infrastructure. Formally-built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; in contrast, informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention. Elemental ’s model combines both: safe building standards and people’s participation in their own dwellings, which become an ongoing project. This is the basic idea, which I really like, but must admit I quail at a drone video of Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile, a company town built in partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company, showing an island of Elemental houses in a plantation sea of green forest, as harsh a contrast as any raw subdivision carved out of the woods.
https://www.rushdixon.com/rush-dixon-architects-blog/2020/2/3/place-matters-the- architecture-of-wg-clark
4 Croffread House, James Island South Carolina, by Clarke and Menefee, 1989 .3 A cube, in concrete, big windows. Looks like a SoHo loft from the 1970s, stacked and transported to the steamy, estuarine, hurricane-prone climate of the South Carolina coast. Which is the romance of it — not the climate, but its loft-like nature, where one is given large concrete spaces and industrial glazing and then left to get on with assigning places for various functions, which, in the end, comes down mostly to furniture. Less than a quarter of each floor plate is given a function and only because that is where the plumbing is stacked. This is a vault of a house, sitting like a Scarpa erratic in what I wish was a landscape something like Sea Island in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust : immoveable, accruing moss and meaning over a very long time. Maybe it does, maybe not, but it is possible. The architecture makes it possible. The photograph is what tells me about possibility: I’ve not been there, I’m vaguely interested in W G Clarke, I see something in this image which is possibly not there but tells me something about how to live.
site: USA, expensive neighbourhood, lots of architect-designed houses, beachfront.
site: Chile, cleared sites for projects
3 https://www.rushdixon.com/rush-dixon-architects- blog/2020/2/3/place-matters-the-architecture-of-wg- clark
2 Elemental plans are open source. Download the working drawing packages for four Incremental Housing Types here: https://www.elementalchile.cl
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