Posted by Santiago Molina on February 03, 2001 at 21:29:41:In Reply to: Re: modular housing posted by Larry Martin on February 01, 2001 at 16:09:36:
Hi larry:
There have been several approaches to reduce cost "social interest housing" (or something like that), mostly focused on reducing construction time by standarising and prefabricating big sections of the unit, bringing all this to its final location, and assembling it. The final result you usually get is a typical house, scaled down a bit, but no real innovation.
In colombia, some of the concerns i had were the fact that most of the people who didn't had the resources to buy a finished house, built their own, in a "proggresive" manner. That meant building a house through a 10-15 years period, adding more and more rooms. Most of this houses are built in clay brick/block and reinforced concrete, and since most of these people don't have the knowledge to calculate this kind of structures, they usually overdimension all this structural elements, to keep it safe. All this produces in the end a house which usually has poor living conditions, low flexibility in the way spaces are distributed (which is necesary since the number of people living in this houses vary all the time), and expensive, product of structural overdimensioning and a long construction time.
I attempted to solve some of this through
1.Giving a good structural solution, light, so the final users can deploy it, modular and whith the least number of parts, to make it simpler.
2.A light, economic modular skin, non structural, so users can eventually change the distribution and reuse this panels elswhere. I also used a more or less standard 2.4x1.2m panel size to reduce product waste and try to control the houses's distribution so no unusable spaces (in size)are created.
3.Flexibility, not though a planned third bedroom, but as a different possible use, distribution or size.
3.A quicker and simpler way to transmit loads to the ground, through puntual footings, in order to avoid the usual and more expensive concrete slab.More or less this is how. My english is not that good, so i hope you make something out of this.
Santiago