that it was "impeccable". From then on, he began to make foundations without concrete. He also created an emergency housing made with doors from that prototype, which he called EKIT, and offered it to the government authorities after the earthquake, but no one replied. He adds that 40,000 doors are produced in Chile every month and this house uses seventy of them. The letter offering the model reads: "Four doors measuring 60 by 200 cm, a PVC blanket and upright metalcon to form a very light panel, which makes it possible to assemble a house easily in just hours (...) In addition to its possibility and accuracy in measurements, the doors contain trapped air that provides a first layer of thermal insulation". OWA was in business for three years. During that time, it made more than 50 houses, and even exported one to the city of Carcassonne in France, but went bankrupt in 2013. There was a legal trial, his French partner fled the country, and Mozó had serious economic problems, but, he says: "I capitalized on that problem". He adds that his ability to overcome adversity comes from the education he received from his mother, who was born in Holland and lived through the Nazi invasion of that country as a child. She passed on to him her great fortitude," he says. Therefore, after the crisis, he created and developed a new construc- tion system - whose acronym is VAP (Viga Aislación Pilar) - that produces sustainable, industrialized wooden houses with zero waste. One of his basic ideas is that the houses have an established price from the moment they are ordered and that the time it takes to build them should also be limited. "Everything is based on two 15 mm structural plywood boards that are glued together," he explains. "The board is cut into five 240 mm strips, taking into account the saw´s 3.5mm blade, and there is 3 mm of waste left over. Plus the sawdust. Then, in a press, the boards are glued together with an adhesive. In this way, they overlap and a beam of 6100 mm by 240 mm by 30 mm is produced. This beam is flexible. Then, two of these beams are glued to a 200 mm EPS polystyrene block, on opposite sides". "That insulation component has a certain compressive strength capacity on its longitudinal surface. I can stand on top of the insulation and it doesn't sag. The block also gives the component portability and structure. With the same pieces of the beam, which are cut, I can make wooden connectors that are screwed together to join beams and columns. This is how the frames that shape the structure of the house are assembled." The press to glue the boards together was Mozó's own creation; it is pneumatic and uses truck suspensions. In the CNC router case, he turned to Urreal, a Chilean company, to manufacture it, which, he says, "did a very good job. It produces 6-meter beams, a dimension that was not available in Chile. The first VAP system frame was 6m x 3m x 6m. "The frame repetition creates a volume with an interior space in many of the cases without interior partitions. This allows the distribution of the rooms to be more flexible," adds Mozó. The final product is an advanced structural work, which is the house's structure, and allows each buyer to customize his or her home by choosing the envelope. The amount of square meters also varies, and they are beginning to commission larger houses, even with double vaulted ceilings and up to two stories. Always with a gable roof if it is for the south. "Not only because of the rain but because it is also a cultural vision," he says. At the time of this interview, he and his team of workers had a 380 m2 house ready and had installed another one over 400 m2 in Panguipulli. All the rough work is shipped ready to assemble, just like a piece of re- tail furniture. The packaging even includes the screws needed for each house and the exact quantity is determined in the planning production process, thanks to a program called Revit. Lastly, Mozó emphasizes that the VAP system has a triple impact: environmental, social, and economic. The first is because its wood structure comes from forestry plantations. The thermal insulation is 3% raw material and 97% air. As well, it is built with zero waste to landfills. As for social aspects, he points out that workers receive salaries starting
at a minimum of 500 thousand pesos, with the corresponding taxes. Being an RT (ready to assemble) system, the houses are assembled by local teams in different regions, to which they provide technical assistance. Finally, the savings are explained by the fact that traditional construc- tion time takes up 50% of the budget, while the VAP system reduces this cost to 30%. !
FEATURE ARTICLE
THE INDUSTRIALIZED PROJECT
By: Sebastián Rozas + Alberto Texidó
Researching Industrialized Architecture prompted us to reflect on the design process that enables a projective act that achieves a difference from traditional processes. Faced with new challenges and requirements of living, implies incorporating new technology, capable of giving a significant response to the contemporary problems of a city, with the diversity of social, environmental, budgetary, and political variables of a more agile and efficient response. Thus, with the public and private support achieved, industrialized construction, which is gradually becoming available to incorporate architectural variables in its process, has to consider some criteria that will differentiate it. For example, concerning its ability to provide faster and more massive responses to the housing deficit and grow- ing informality, a situation associated with migration problems and climate change, but also caused by slow physical and administrative procedures. It is also about standardization, which implies a unique answer to a larger-scale problem, where replication arises inciting non-differentiated answers. It can be thought of in terms of its incre- ments and adaptation to different social or topographic environments, which are always confronted with ways of living, where even innovation can become a disincentive. For this reason, it is important to understand that industrialization, as a creative response to social problems, has to assume regulatory compliance, the dimensioning of enclosures or fundable surfaces, and also implies adequate designs for seismic resistance, fire, appropriate thermal insulation or appropriate locations that are not exposed to risk. These are situations that often precede the Architecture but also require a necessarily careful previous step. All this without neglecting sustainability, where the type of material chosen, transportable or not, measures its carbon footprint and recog- nizes the logic of the circular economy, its origin, disassembly, reuse, or reabsorption. In this regard, applied research in universities has been and will be a key accompaniment. Regarding the relevance of repetitive design in different climat- ic contexts, an interesting debate arises regarding architecture as a site-specific action. With this adaptation, there seems to be a reflection on the search for the massive, so that it does not forget the orientation, the views, or the thermal insulation that will be different depending on where it is located, avoiding the object that is simply imitated. Finally, the decision to build "on-site" or "in the industry" allows a variety of solutions that differ in their transfer and place of installation, in panels, modules, or assemblies, exposing the advantage of this new way. As we understand architectural thinking after industrialization is being adopted in offices and workshops that went from the plan to the model, becoming a challenge that has now become a required tool. This will give us a new solution in which our technical and ethical work has an indisputable role in urban progress as a new architectural, environ- mental, and social expression, something that, we believe, this report encourages and motivates. !
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