Alejandro Aravena Posts Free Home Designs Online Skye Gould and Leanna Garfield - Tech Insider
go to original April 10, 2016

The fourth housing complex design, 'Monterrey' in Mexico City, cost $20,000 per home to build.. (Elemental)

In January, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena won a Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent to the Nobel Prize, for his commitment to designing public spaces and low-income homes that are both beautiful and functional.

Now he's releasing four of his housing designs for free download to tackle the global affordable housing crisis, Dezeen reports. He announced the initiative at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on April 5.

The need for affordable housing is more crucial than ever. City dwellers in the world’s largest cities pay $650 billion more than they can afford for housing, according to a recent report. At this rate, a third of all urban households – about 1.6 billion people – will be living in "crowded and unsafe housing" by 2025.

Aravena, who leads the firm Elemental, has spent his 22-year career trying to address this, designing social housing and rebuilding cities after earthquakes.

With the open-source database, he hopes that government agencies and other architects will riff on his designs.

He is releasing designs for three low-income housing complexes in Chile — Quinta Monroy, Lo Barnechea, and Villa Verde — as well as the Monterrey complex in Mexico City.

Read the rest at Tech Insider

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