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
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certainly new, an avant-garde that prepares the ground for future buildings totally
sustainable, evidence of a renewed approach to the architectural project, mature for the
construction of a new world where the humanity and its needs are again the main issue
.
If on the one hand, housing policies are responsible for providing the prescriptive and
economic instruments to provide a "roof over their heads" for the needy, on the other
hand the architectural debate has to wonder about the types, the aggregation and the
technology for the construction of these dwelling, as long as they are not merely
"shelters", but structures able to properly answer to new needs expressed by the society
and inspired by sustainable issue. The requests for a radical change, then, must involve
both the design and construction process: the renewal can not prescind from the
application of energy saving devices, the application of construction methods that
minimize energy waste and maximize recycling on one side, but it has also to bring up to
date the housing types, as spacial devices capable of hosting new social behaviours.
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.
The research finally identifies and correlates the areas within which design housing "low-
cost and sustainable", where “sustainable” involves economics - the low cost, social -
user participation, than environmental issues - energy saving. The aim is to emphasize
the use of industrialized building systems, which guarantees a certain and certificate
energy performance within the limited financial budget imposed by the current market
conditions, together with the construction of public housing adaptable to the different
requirements expressed by the users.
Typology and construction: from the frame concept to freedom and polyvalence
Sustainability, therefore, as the sum of economic, social and environmental costs. Cost,
then, as the sum of "natural cost" (the cost of construction) and "running cost" (the cost
that increases or decreases with the variation of the needs)
. If, in fact, in the age of
post-war reconstruction, in which the contingent causes pushed the construction of
buildings identifiable with the housing urgency itself, reducing the natural cost was the
4
This is the case of the prize “Leone d’oro” at the Biennale in Venice in 2010 given to the Barhain Pavillion,
with its three fishing huts, while the theme “People meet in architecture” developed by the curator Kazuyo
Sejima was more focused on the aesthetic phenomena.
5
The founder of the theories of value in economics, William Petty (1662), describes the cost of a product as
the sum of its cost of production (natural cost, connected to its production) and the value assigned to it by a
series of contingent causes (running cost, that increases or decreases as needs change or mode).
