The Peru Project – Low Cost Housing for the United Nations: Interlocking concrete blocks for mortarless block wall

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 ...

The floors are 10 cm unreinforced concrete slabs, laid down in 5.20 meters strips, similar to the house width, by a road building machine. Exposed edges are turned down, filled block (20 cm x 20 cm). Structural pin connections for ...

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 ...

Two photographs of two axonometric drawings, the first showing part of a mortarless wall constructed by interlocking blocks and its connection to the floating slab, and the second an exterior mortarless block cavity wall and its connection to the composite ...