Peru Project – Low Cost Housing for the United Nations

Master plan for a community of 1500 houses, submitted as one out of twelve other competition entries for the United Nations sponsored international housing competition PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda). The Center for Environmental Structure was chosen as the United States representative in the competition. The houses were to be built at a gross density of 37 houses per hectare on a site of 40 hectares, eight kilometers north of Lima. The financial requirements of the competition were that each house be conctractor built, at a cost ranging from $1800 to $3800, and that they be sold to low income workers earning between $65 to $135 per month. The proposed design was to help the evolution of the Peruvian community and house design in the future. Accordingly, the proposed designs included besides the series of required drawings two additional innovative elements: a) A choice process which allowed the final site and house plans to be formed, in detail, by the idiosyncratic needs of the individual families who would buy the houses, and b) Sixty-seven general design principles, called "patterns", which described the Peruvian way of life, and could be used over and over again. The collection of these patterns was one of the first project specific pattern languages developed by C.E.S. These first patterns contributed to the development of "A Pattern Language", published in 1977. .