Housing will always be a theme and challenge for architects. Thinking about it in a way that serves the entire population, including the most precarious contexts, is one of the most complex, and perhaps impossible, tasks to be fully consolidated. Each place and family will always place different priority points on a project, which is why resorting to a standard solution is not ideal. However, several proposals present intervention possibilities that create an intricate seam between the most different factors: basic infrastructure, program, self desires, aesthetics, budget. For this reason, we have gathered here some Brazilian examples of affordable housing, ranging from a single-family house to large residential blocks.
However, before analyzing the selected projects, we think it is fundamental to pay attention to a critical analysis of what would be the role of the architect when he or she intervenes in these spaces.For this reason, we bring here an important question from Paola Berenstein Jacques, present in her article Estética das Favelas: “From the most extreme case, where the favela was purged and its inhabitants relocated in Cartesian modernist housing projects, to the current milder case, where the architects of the so-called postmodernity began to intervene in the existing favelas in order to transform them into neighborhoods, the rational logic of architects and urban planners is still a priority and they end up imposing their own aesthetic, which is almost always that of the so-called formal city. In other words, the favela must become a formal neighborhood so that better integration with the rest of the city becomes possible. But haven't favelas been part of the city for more than a century? Is this formal integration necessary?”
With these questions in mind, we invite you to check out projects previously published on ArchDaily, which bring different ways of thinking and intervening in more popular contexts, from favelas to rural areas, accompanied by texts taken from their descriptive memorials.
