Villa Verde Housing

In 2009 a forestry company asked the Chilean design team for a plan to help its workers reach a permanent home. The team developed housing types within the national subsidy programmes, offered by the company to its workers as a kind of grant that housing committees could use when applying for public funds.

For the first time, the project let the team design for the upper end of the housing policy. Instead of finishing one of their cheaper types with the extra money, they again applied incremental construction and priority for the most complex parts, this time with higher standards for both the initial and the final house.

Each home starts at 56.88 square metres and can grow to 85.1 square metres. The pitched roof is built over the whole final volume, half closed and half left as an open timber frame that families fill in. The site holds 484 houses on 8.5 hectares, at a budget of about 700 dollars per square metre.

Most projects in the wider plan, estimated at 9,000 homes in thirty towns, were meant for towns of 10,000 to 20,000 people. At that scale housing has a major impact, and these are often the places with the poorest urban standards.