When Román Viñoly, a director at his father's firm Rafael Viñoly Architects, visited Chile in 2010, he toured an affordable-housing project on the outskirts of Santiago that by all measures should have been a success. It provided clean, structurally sound houses for Chileans who had previously lived in self-constructed slums. The problem? The rows of identical, cookie-cutter units felt more like cellblocks than homes, and their one-size-fits-all approach alienated residents who were used to arranging their dwellings to suit their family structures and living habits. “You saw people vandalizing their own homes, writing graffiti on their own houses,” says Viñoly, who this spring is building a prototype for a low-cost modular house that residents will be able to configure themselves.
Viñoly's project is part of the latest wave in an effort to design extremely low-cost permanent shelters for people around the globe who lack adequate housing. Inspired by ambitious goals, such as the $100 house proposed by author and social entrepreneur Paul Polak in his 2008 book Out of Poverty, these new designs use different degrees of standardization to push down costs, but they also give homeowners a lead role in determining how their houses will look and function.
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