Long-term residents of an informal community in danger of being priced out of a district of metropolitan Santiago are able to stay near schools and jobs owing to the construction of subsidized housing.
The Nueva Esperanza School, which was completed in 2009, attempts to live up to its name'new hope in Spanish'by providing a much-needed one-room schoolhouse for a coastal Ecuadorian community. Simple materials (including locally sourced wood, dried palm fronds, and a minimum of purchased hardware) went into the 387-square-foot thatched-roof building, designed by David Barrag'n and Pascual Gangotena of Quito-based al bordE arquitectos, who were commissioned by one of the school's teachers, and donated their services. Construction was a team effort: Members of the community assisted a team of volunteers and al bordE staffers to finish the building's hexagonal base, walls,
In the low-income, banana-farming community of Shiroles, 140 miles southeast of San Jos', infrastructure and basic amenities are sparse: Before San Jos'based architects Elisa Marin and Manfred Barboza helped establish the Shiroles Rural School in 2009, the closest school was 12 miles away. Government assistance, too, was minimal. Instead, 'we had a lot of support from the community,' says 27-year-old Marin. This support came in both matter and might: parents and other members of the community donated manual labor and building material'timber from the surrounding forest and corrugated metal from a small store about an hour away. The most recent
Cool and urbane, the Fernando Botero Library Park stands sentry on the hillside of San Cristóbal, a rough-edged “urban village” on Medellín’s western fringes. The city’s sixth library-park, it is one of the newest additions to the public building program here, which has garnered worldwide attention in recent years. “It is a difficult topography,” says G Ateliers Architecture’s Orlando Garcia of the mountainous terrain dotted by informal brick construction, “so we wanted to do a simple yet powerful building.” Referring to the constraints of time, budget, and the local workforce’s ability, Garcia notes, “We worked with the reality of our
Starting in 2006, residents of Moravia, a community living atop a mountain of garbage in Medell'n, were relocated to new public housing in Pajarito, a hillside neighborhood on the city's fringes, accessible by the new Metrocable line. Medell'n-based Planb arquitectos and Ctrl G partnered in a public competition to create this daycare center for 300 of Pajarito's children. Deformed hexagon modules allowed for easy rotation and organizational flexibility of classrooms. The team linked the board-formed concrete volumes in a ring and connected them with an exterior corridor, rendering terraces and cloistered areas for play. The roofs fold to mimic the
'We wanted the construction to be very straightforward since, for many people, this would be their first encounter with technology,' notes Mexico City architect Iv'n Hern'ndez Quintela of his community tech hubs. To create classrooms, information centers, and cafeterias, modular units are inserted into existing community centers. Hern'ndez says the units were inspired by 'cimbras,' the makeshift scaffolding found at local construction sites. For example, two-by-fours form the structure for a classroom's polycarbonate walls (left). Now, 72 of Hern'ndez's computer centers are open around the city, offering classes to all ages for about 15 cents each. ARCHITECT: Ludens (Iv'n Hern'ndez
The residents of Shigeru Ban’s Container Temporary Housing in Onagawa used to call themselves the unluckiest people in town. For starters, the Miyagi Prefecture town of 10,000 was all but destroyed on March 11, when 3,800 of its 4,500 houses sustained significant damage or were demolished outright. Then they lost the lottery for temporary housing, leaving them no choice but to remain even longer in the town’s gymnasium-turned-evacuation-center. But after moving into Ban’s buildings, finished in November, this crowd feels it is the luckiest. Though the end product proved to be worth the wait, Ban’s housing seemed to be a
Having received the green light from the Iwate Prefectural government to erect 60 units of temporary housing for Rikuzentakata, a seaside town of 24,000 that lost 48 percent of its homes, Sumita Jutaku Sangyo, a timber construction company based in the blighted prefecture, tapped Tokyo-based architects Masayuki Harada and Daisuke Sugawara to develop a scheme for the new homes on the appointed site—a hilly inland campground designed for recreational vehicles. Located inland in Sumita-cho, a town that survived the disaster relatively unscathed, the campsite’s individual berths were equipped with utility hookups, and seemed an ideal place for interim housing. But
One year after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, Japan is making progress toward rebuilding its devastated east coast, assisted by local architects and construction professionals eager to help—but there is still a long way to go. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s eastern Sanriku coast, triggering an enormous tidal wave that left 310,000 people homeless, 23,000 dead or missing, and a cluster of unstable nuclear reactors. Today the debris is largely cleared, roads are open, railways are back in operation, and more than half of the damaged seaports are functioning again. And there is more good news.
An advisor to the Kamaishi city government, Tokyo-based architect Toyo Ito has proposed a reconstruction scheme incorporating both built and landscape elements. Bordering the coast, the plan features berms, green belts, and sloped building sites for housing, intended to mitigate future flooding or tidal waves, while a “Fisherman’s Wharf” area and seaside park is planned to reinvigorate the city’s commercial center. ARCHITECT: Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects. BUDGET: N/A. CONTEXT: Located on the Iwate Prefecture coast, Kamaishi City was heavily damaged on March 11. Though local citizens are keen to resurrect their town as before, the government envisions rebuilding on
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