Customizing Affordable Housing in Mexico

Conventional affordable housing tends to be, well, conventional. So I’m always excited to see architects successfully reinvent it. Case in point: the Chilean architecture firm Elemental, which designs innovative social housing for Mexican citizens. What sets them apart? They build just half the house, allotting residents the time, effort, and resources to construct the rest themselves. For a building type so associated with homogeneity and repetition this is potentially revolutionary. Earlier this month, Elemental won the Index Award, the world’s largest monetary prize in design, for the project.

Elemental Monterrey was commissioned by the government of Nuevo León, in northwest Mexico, to design 70 homes in the city of Santa Catarina. Their Incremental Housing Complex consists of a continuous three story building with the “home” (on the first floor) and a two-story apartment above. The units are designed, the architects explain, to “technically and economically facilitate the final middle class standard of which we will hand over the first half.” With this as their strategy, Elemental smartly invested government resources in building the difficult parts of the home (bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, and dividing walls); an open system allows the family to expand as necessary.