| Affordable housing is a critical area of architecture, yet, for the most part, it has been an area dominated by uniform and unremarkable structures bereft of interesting design elements or architectural significance. Affordable housing in Chile has been no exception. Although the country is recognized worldwide for its achievements in housing policy and its economic solutions, very little has been written about the design of housing. The desperate housing deficit, which has plagued the country since the 1920s, has increasingly resulted in an 'affordable house' made under restrictive operational, budgetary and political conditions; the overall effect of which is a sort of 'affordable city.' Consequently, today the problem of housing is not merely a question of policy and finances, but also of its architecture and specially its contribution to the urban environment.; Between 1930 and 1960, the proportion of Chileans living in cities increased from 48% to 61%, underscoring the need to find housing solutions that required a dedicated technical and professional approach. The new social welfare programs with their housing initiatives, and the experts responsible for them, were to guide a modernization process that would evolve into a far-reaching transformation of Chilean cities. This was the climate when the Caja de Habitacion Popular (Popular Housing Fund), the first Chilean housing agency established in 1936.; Recently, as the housing deficit started to recede, and attention has shifted from the minimal house, towards inquiries about housing quality design in the search for better answers. This dissertation focuses on the Caja's affordable housing architecture during its struggling implementation phases, and how it shaped large portions of Santiago from the 1930s to the 1960s. It also explores the transformation in public housing programs and agencies from their amateur beginnings to their later professionalized approach. It examines a number of the public and private housing built during Santiago's authorities, planners and architects persistent efforts to modernize and develop the city. These projects explored both the potentialities and limitations of urban design in housing and made a profound impact on housing design in Chile, as well as on the morphology of its cities. |
