The Peru Project – Low Cost Housing for the United Nations: Cross sections of rooms depicting the entire construction system

Boxed beams rectangular in section, 20 cm wide, 40 cm deep and 5 meters long, made of 6cm bamboos, placed over plywood templates, with a core of poly-urethane fire-retardant foam, foamed in place. The bamboos are pinned and spot glued ...

The 2nd floor and roof structure are bamboo/polyurethane foam sandwitch planks laid over beams. The outer skin of the planks are made of 6cm bamboos and the core is two lbs. density polyurethane. A sand-sulfur topping is poured after planks ...

Bearing walls, shear walls and ground floor partitions are cavity walls of interlocking, self-aligning concrete blocks, moulded on site. The block is self-supporting up to a height of three floors. Vertical edges, corners and horizontal upper edges are either poured ...

One of the main topics of research, included in every building project, was to identify, early on in the design process, the material and techniques of construction. This would re-establish building as an art, and allow rapid shaping and adaptation, ...

The second of Alexander’s early works published by the Center for Environmental Structure, lays out the process of creating the pattern language for a group of houses designed for an experimental housing competition in Lima, Peru in 1969. It ...

Photograph of detailed cross section, demonstrating the complete system of construction innovations to be implemented in each house, using mortarless load bearing cavity walls coated with molten sulphur for tensile reinforcement, and light weight beam and plank system made from ...