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