In January, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena won a Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent to the Nobel Prize, for his commitment to designing public spaces and low-income homes that are both beautiful and functional.
Now he's releasing four of his housing designs for free download to tackle the global affordable housing crisis, Dezeen reports. He announced the initiative at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on April 5.
The need for affordable housing is more crucial than ever. City dwellers in the world’s largest cities pay $650 billion more than they can afford for housing, according to a recent report. At this rate, a third of all urban households – about 1.6 billion people – will be living in "crowded and unsafe housing" by 2025.
Aravena, who leads the firm Elemental, has spent his 22-year career trying to address this, designing social housing and rebuilding cities after earthquakes.
With the open-source database, he hopes that government agencies and other architects will riff on his designs.
He is releasing designs for three low-income housing complexes in Chile — Quinta Monroy, Lo Barnechea, and Villa Verde — as well as the Monterrey complex in Mexico City.
The first work, Quinta Monroy, cost a mere $7,500 per unit to build in 2004. Today, 93 families live in each of the 390-square-foot duplexes in Iquique, Chile.
Lo Barnechea houses feature three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and bathroom, and are made out of low-cost concrete, brick, and steel. Completed in 2010, 150 families live in the development in Santiago, Chile. The Chilean government gave Elemental $10,000 to build each house.
Aravena built Villa Verde, a set of 615-square-foot homes, after an earthquake devastated Constitución, Chile in 2010. In fewer than 100 days, 484 families moved into the rowhomes, which cost about $39,900 each to build.
The fourth housing complex design, Monterrey, cost $20,000 per home to build.
Developers will likely need to adapt the designs to comply with local building codes, Aravena said.
"We will put online, available as public knowledge, all the plans, all the files of the projects that we have done so far – the ones that we believe have been successful," he said at the press conference.
