VILLA VERDE HOUSING , CONSTITUCION, CHILEBY AR. ALEJANDRA ARAVENA

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REASON FOR MAKING THIS HOUSING

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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. Together, the earthquake and tsunami were responsible for more than 500 deaths.

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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.

Reconstruction

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The buildings are constructed as timber frames, supported on concrete foundations, roofed in zinc, and clad internally in 10mm gypsum board and externally in 6mm fiber cement board.

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HC&P STAGES OF CONSTRUCTION

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INTERIOR

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Half a good house is better than one small one

Made by SHUBHAM HARLALKA GCPIA , SURAT