VILLA VERDE HOUSING

ALEJANDRA ARAVENA
 REASON FOR MAKING THIS HOUSING
• SEVERE EARTHQUAKE
THAT OCCURRED ON
FEBRUARY 27,2010, OFF
THE COAST OF SOUTH
CENTRAL CHILE, CAUSING
WIDESPREAD DAMAGE
ON LAND AND INITIATING
A TSUNAMI THAT
DEVASTATED SOME
COASTAL AREAS OF THE
COUNTRY.
• THE EARTHQUAKE AND
TSUNAMI WERE
RESPONSIBLE FOR MORE
THAN 500 DEATHS.
 RECONSTRUCTION
• MORE THAN 50,000 PROVISIONAL HOMES HAD BEEN ERECTED, AND HOUSING SUBSIDIES HAD BEEN DISBURSED TO
MANY WHO HAD BEEN LEFT WITHOUT SHELTER.

• IN JULY2013 THE GOVERNMENT REPORTED THAT SOME 74 PERCENT OF THE 2,22,000 HOME-REBUILDING PROJECTS
IT HAD SUBSIDIZED WERE COMPLETE.

• Villa Verde project that provides worker housing for the forestry company Arauco, it decided to apply the same
strategy of incremental construction with higher construction and finish standards.
• The scale of the development a total of
9,000 units are estimated within 30
different towns - allowed the research
costs to be absorbed within the overall
development budget. In this first phase
484 houses have been built, together
with three community centers.

• As with Elemental's other recent

housing projects the concept of user-
led expansion is at the heart of the
scheme's design.

• A base build is provided that allows

the residents to purchase a simple
house within a relatively constrained
budget: the houses sell at between
$25,000-40,000.
• Elemental proposed combining the
funds available for temporary
emergency shelters and social
housing to provide better-quality
shelters with a higher initial cost
that could then be dismantled and
reused in an incremental social
housing scheme.

• The architects designed the social

housing units as half of a good
house instead of a complete, but
small one: building-in the
possibility for residents to double
the floor area of the house to 80
square meters.
• Next to each built section of the
row house is an open space of
the same size into which
residents can expand their
house .
• Innovation in the built
environment in this project did
not come from new materials,
new techniques or new systems:
it came from having the courage
to follow common sense ideas, to
understand the needs of the
people of Constitución , and by
viewing the problem in terms of
both the micro and macro-
environments .
On the ground floor this base build
comprises a small, shared space
combining kitchen, dining and
living room, plus a bathroom and
outside laundry space. On the first
floor there are two bedrooms and
an additional bathroom.
STAGES OF CONSTRUCTION