Neighborhood of Seventy Low Cost Houses

Seventy low-cost houses in 4,2 acres, designed by families, and partially built by families, as part of the self help construction process of Construyamos, the largest self help cooperative in Colombia, with a total construction volume of 50,000 houses per year. This project was to be a model of an entirely new kind of low cost housing process, in which a more organic community can be achieved, without increasing construction cost.
The project was built in Santa Rosa de Cabal, under the guidance of C.E.S., on a sloping hillside, in a rural area. It includes 70 houses, ranging in size from 100 m2 to 139 m2. The houses are two-story main volumes and one-to-two-story secondary volumes. The two-story volumes shape the streets, and the secondary volumes help define a garden at the back.
In the Santa Rosa project, all the houses are different. The overall configuation of the site and the forming of the streets in parallel with the “contribution” of each house to the shaping of public spaces, were conducted on the land by the members of C.E.S. with representatives of Construyamos and the housing group. It is only after each individual plot had been “set” in relation to the larger whole, that the individual families took over, and laid out their houses on the land, with a C.E.S. “layout coordinator”.