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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town
1981 to 1983The project focused on the housing component of the master plan for the new town of Guasare, in the state of Maracaibo, Venezuela, planned to accomodate several thousand workers. The design of its neighborhoods, each one for about 250 families, is based on a step by step process to be folowed; it starts from the neighborhood as whole, and then proceeding with the formation of its streets, house fronts, house volumes, gardens, house interior layout and so on. Strong emphasis is given to the participation of users in the layout and design of individual houses, as well as to the range and diversity of the financing packages, their correspondence to the economic status of the families, and the allowance for an incremental completion of the house.
Contents
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Letter updating with information about the acquired lot for the project, its physical characteristics and commenting on the observations and proposals on the design; asking Christopher Alexander for input by the C.E.S., adjustment and guidelines, where seen necessary
12/01/1982
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Letter explaining in English the basic ideas and updates of the project
15/01/1982
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Letter addressed to Rosario, sent via Kevin Lynch traveling to Maracaibo; describes the progress on the work being accomplished, and includes an 8-page attachment on the "Form and Organization of a Typical Guasare Neighborhood", with references on lot subdivision, house growth, house layout the form of the street
01/12/1982
SEE ALL Correspondence
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A Process for the Layout of Houses: The Construction of New Neighborhoods for Guasare New Town, Venezuela
01/11/1982
39-page draft of the project report, which concentrates on the actual laying out of the neighborhood and houses, the administration and financing, the construction and street embellishment; with appendices. .
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A Process for the Layout of Houses: The Construction of New Neighborhoods for Guasare New Town, Venezuela
01/02/1983
398-page draft of the project report, with original drawings and sketches; the draft includes chapters on the neighborhood layout process, on the individual house layout process, on construction methods, on the financial aspects of the project, on construction methods and ...
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Preliminary Design Drawings - Neighborhood Plans
01/01/1982
Two simulation plans of the detailed internal structure of two neighborhood areas.
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Preliminary Design Drawings - Neighborhood Street Elevations
01/01/1982
Two elevations of the neighborhood streets, conveying their character .
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Sketches for the global layout of neighborhoods
01/01/1982
Sketch illustrating a vision of the town as “a system of arterial collector roads, with neighborhoods hanging on these collectors like a bunch of grapes,” accompanied with four pages of grid-like versions of incremental growth of the future town development.
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Neighborhood Plans for Guasare New Town: Housing for Guasare - This is a preliminary paper in which we describe the process and physical layout envisaged for the whole housing production of the town of Guasare
01/09/1982
57-page document with the following contents: 1. Assumptions about the large scale physical layout of Guasare; 2. Assumptions about the internal layout of neighborhoods; 3. Assumptions about the distribution of income and available cash flow; 4. Assumptions about the process ...
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The Construction of New Neighborhoods for Guasare New Town: Contract
09/07/1982
10-page contract between the “Corporacion de Desarrollo de la Region Zuliana” and the Center for Environmental Structure, with signing representative Artemis Anninou, for developing a design and layout process based on user participation. The study would be used as a ...
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Neighborhood Plans for Guasare New Town: The Construction of New Neighborhoods for Guasare New Town, Venezuela
01/05/1983
197-page report on the design process and physical layout for the Guasare neighborhoods, organized in five chapters, as follows: Chapter 1. The layout of the individual neighborhood; Chapter 2. The layout of the individual house; Chapter 3. Financing and administration; ...
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Neighborhood Plans for Guasare New Town: Notes
01/01/1981
One page of notes and statistics about housing and real estate facts in the 1960’s in Venezuela.
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Neighborhood Plans for Guasare New Town: Housing Production in Guasare
25/09/1982
14-page document with tentative conclusions regarding the housing production in the new town of Guasare, discussed by the design group of ISA, and tentatively approved. Includes points crucial to the organization of the project, describing the percentages of family-owned (“user-intimate”) ...
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Neighborhood Plans for Guasare New Town: Notes and sketches
01/01/1982
Six pages including a rough sketch of the general site organization, a graph on house financing, and notes on estimating number of houses and house sizes with rough outline.
SEE ALL Records
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Photographs of drawings
01/01/1982
Drawing of a typical house with the courtyard as its main center.
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Photographs of project model
01/01/1982
Four photographs of a small scale simulation model out of balsa wood, for testing the main rules for the layout of house volumes, gardens and garden walls, and the parallel formation of roads. The positive space of gardens is shown ...
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Housing Plan for Guasare New Town: Photographs of sketches simulating the layout proces
01/01/1982
A sequence of ten sketches by Christopher Alexander and Artemis Anninou simulating the unfolding of the layout process of a neighborhood. It is a dynamic process driven by the creation of centers in the form of gardens, streets and buildings. ...
SEE ALL Photographs
References
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The Unfolding of Public Space and Gardens as Positive Space
Outdoor space is positive when it is shaped just as a room is shaped. It has a contained character, it is bounded by walls, fences, natural vegetation, enclosure of some kind. It looks into other positive spaces, some larger, some ...
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The Sequence of Unfolding - Generative Codes for the Design Process
In architecture, as in other things, the "right" sequence is of vital importance. It is a generative sequence of progressive differentiations, which allow space to unfold in the right order. Each differentiation acts on the product of the previous ...
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The Uniqueness of People's Individual Worlds, Always Respected and Manifested
In the last two centuries "modular" design has produced identical apartments, arranged in typical apartment blocks. The same is true for mass-produced furniture. Uniqueness, which expresses personal needs and whiches, and which springs from the need to adapt and connect ...
SEE ALL Scientific Research
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The Nature of Order - An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
Book Two - The Process of Creating Life
2002
“The Process of Creating Life”, the second volume of “The Nature of Order” series presents a dynamic theory of living structure. It begins with an analysis of transformations, which occur in nature, and the distinction between structure-preserving transformations, responsible for ...
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The Nature of Order - An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
Book Three - A Vision of a Living World
2005
“A Vision of a Living World”, the third volume of “The Nature of Order” series, presents, for the first time, a full spectrum of Alexander’s and CES built and unbuilt works. The book describes hundreds of buildings, plans, neighborhoods, drawings, ...
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A Process for the Layout of Houses: Student report on the Guasare Project; also a number of versions of the in-progress work
01/01/1982
154-page report on the “Rules” of the design process and the results and implications of this process: Introduction; PART I “Rules for the Layout of Houses” is about the layout of the neighborhood and its houses right on the site ...
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The Unified Building Process: Variables which Produce a Coherent Structure of Space
01/11/1986
378-page doctoral dissertation in nine chapters, based on the fundamental assumption that “wholeness”, as geometric quality of space, is dependent upon the process that generates it. Chapter 1: Design and Construction as a Unified Act. Chapter 2: Feeling and actuality. ...
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Notes II, Community Design Sequence: Research Project / Preparatory Phase - Guasare Project as Basis for European Housing - Notes for Discussion
01/05/2002
25-page report with notes based on an earlier review of a series of C.E.S. housing projects, most of them developed for third world countries, and particular focus on the 1983 “Guasare New Town” project in Venezuela, with scope of putting ...