L o w C o s t H o u s i n g R a t i o n a l D e s i g n M e t h o d s
369
LOW COST HOUSING
RATIONAL DESIGN METHODS AND LIVING SPACE QUALITY:
TYPOLOGY AND CONSTRUCTION
Luisa Otti
1
1
Università degli Studi Roma 3, Facoltà di Architettura, DIPSA - Dipartimento di Progettazione e Studio
dell’Architettura,Italy
Abstract
The housing emergency is nowadays one of the main discussion topic in architecture
and urban planning for many reasons: the society transformation, the new household
idea, the unsettled job market, the global financial crisis in 2008, that has stricken in
particular young people, immigrants, young couples, elderly people, city users, “atypical”
families, in short that “grey area” of the population not “poor enough” to be in the list for a
public housing project, but not “rich enough” to buy or rent a house. In this scenario, a
large number of recent public and subsidized housing projects in Europe boasts of
catchy slogans as “social”, “sustainable” or “low cost”: due to the previous reasons and
the catchment area with a high education level and particularly sensitive to these issues,
those labels certainly contribute to increasing the building marketing value. But what
exactly those terms mean and to which step of the architectural process
(design/build/manage) could be applied is something more difficult to understand and
explain.
The research, therefore, analyses recent European public and subsidized housing
projects that used in particular the slogans “low-cost” and “innovation”: are these words
properly used and which typological and technological devices have been used to
achieve the “affordable home” goal?
The first phase of the survey proposes case studies of European low cost buildings with
innovative contents; in a second phase the most significant of them are analysed with
particular reference to typological flexibility and construction systems with a high
standardization degree; in the end the research proposes the results as “design
guidelines”, in order to provide useful tools for designing a low-cost multi-storey
residential building.
The study argues that the answer to low-cost housing is not just in technological
solutions, but is the typological and innovative design to lead choices for building
systems site-specific and really innovative.
Keywords
housing emergency, low-cost, typological innovation, technological innovation,
prefabricated systems
