Settlers of Apan: the social housing concepts of Central America's architectural greats

With 32 prototypes, the elite of contemporary Mexican architecture demonstrates how multifaceted social housing could be.

Practical, durable and good: when you ask architects to share their vision for more livable social housing, they often end up making the very grand gesture. Affordable housing for the many is not an industrious task, but rather a discipline worthy of a king, at least since the modern era, and sometimes it results in Unesco-worthy gems like Stuttgart's Weissenhofsiedlung or Le Corbusier's Wohnmaschine. And associated with this is the claim to deliver a complete redefinition in form and function not only of the buildings themselves, but also, if possible, of society as a whole. The Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores, or Infonavit for short, is looking for a somewhat more modest answer with its Laboratorio de Vivienda. Here, too, in the central Mexican city of Apan, the aim was to formally redefine living, and the names involved read almost as illustrious as those of classical modernism: Frida Escobedo, Derek Dellekamp, Tatiana Bilbao, Fernanda Canales, Michel Rojkind - the list is a Who's Who of contemporary Central American architecture. Their brief: one single-family house each; flexible to use, easy to expand, cheap to build. Functional and beautiful, but without the vanity of that very grand gesture that always made the modernists seem a good deal ahead of their time, but also arguably radical and a little presumptuous.

Of a total of 84 designs submitted, 32 were realized as prototypes at the Infonavit test site in Apan, Mexico: 1 De Villar Chacón 2 Frida Escobedo 3 Dellekamp + Schleich 4 Rozana Montiel 5 Ambrosi Etchegaray 6 Zooburbia 7 Zago 8 Mauricio Rocha, Gabriela Carrillo 9 TAX 10 Griffin Enright 11 Tatiana Bilbao 12 Francisco Pardo 13 TEN 14 Pita & Bloom 15 BGP 16 Zeller & Moye 17 Accidental Estudio 18 Nuño MacGregor De Buen 19 Saya+ 20 Cano Vera 21 Fernanda Canales 22 RNThomsen 23 Productora 24 Agraz 25 Michel Rojkind 26 Tactic-A 27 Gaeta Springall 28 ADG 29 4:00 A.M. 30 CRO Studio 31 JC Arquitectura 32 DCPP

One of them, Walter Gropius, got to the heart of the matter as early as 1925: "A thing is determined by its essence," he wrote. "In order to design it so that it functions properly - a vessel, a chair, a house - its essence must first be explored; for it should serve its purpose perfectly, that is, fulfill its function practically, be durable, cheap and 'beautiful'." In Mexico, the same idea gave rise to 32 prototypes with an open spatial program and made of simple materials: corrugated iron, brick, concrete, lots of wood. Common to all the designs is their play with basic geometric shapes, from Frida Escobedo's impressive barrel vault to the gable roof under which Jorge Ambrosi and Gabriela Etchegaray stowed a single, continuous room. Above all, however, the architects are united in one thing: the consistent recourse to the vernacular building tradition of their country, to typologies skilfully adapted in form and function to the respective climate and developed over centuries, which form something like the anonymous vernacular architecture of Mexico. Not the unprecedented, rather the tried and true reimagined: modular frameworks, sliding panels, passive air conditioning, adapted to tight budgets and available resources. Most of the 32 houses are even designed so that future residents could more or less assemble them themselves.

Limited budgets, simple geometric shapes - social housing can nevertheless be exceedingly diverse. The New York office MOS is responsible for the master plan in Apan.

The multiform little flock comes together on a kind of test site of the Infonavit, whose planning was taken over by the New York office MOS. Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample had already led the selection from a total of 84 invited offices, for the realization the two architects developed a master plan, which oriented itself less at classical urban structures - house lines, street canyons, in between places and parks - than rather at the poetic basic idea of a garden. Instead of being arranged in regular rows along streets, Apan's 32 prototypes are loosely grouped together on nearly 20,000 planted square meters crisscrossed by paths. Five sections represent corresponding climatic zones of the country, the rest is maximum permeability. There is no front, no back, no clear property lines; instead, the vision is of a vibrant community whose members can move freely between private and public space. In this way, the MOS architects made the social itself the core idea of social housing.

"Above all, social housing needs social spaces, not fixed grids. Like in a garden."

So, in addition to the individual solutions implemented in the prototypes, here lies another approach to improving the quality of life for residents, even without big financial leaps. And in this respect, too, Laboratorio de Vivienda differs from its modern forebears, because it sees itself less as an overall design on a greenfield site (even if that's exactly where it has landed for the time being) than as one possible set-up among many that could just as easily be connected to existing buildings. And could perhaps even be transferred to more urban constellations: "Why," says Michael Meredith, "should cities always be laid out in mechanical grids and structured solely by streets?"

There is no living in the 32 residential units yet; the Apan settlement is intended as an educational center where architects, developers and students can experience the new housing concept on a full scale. The Mexican designer Héctor Esrawe developed two furniture series especially for the living laboratory, which were used to furnish the prototypes. The usual furnishings for such low-cost projects take too little account of the actual needs of the users, he says, "it's always completely out of context". Esrawe was inspired by Bauhaus designs to create a collection of plywood and tubular steel, and another with bulky wooden frames and wickerwork that harkens back to Brazilian modernism. Like the houses, they are indeed practical, durable, cheap - and beautiful. Gropius would be thrilled.

Frida Escobedo

Frida Escobedo (2): The Mexican architect placed a barrel vault on brick walls.

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