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Prefabricated Wood System for Housing

Part 2 Project 2001
Tomas McKay
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile | Chile
The project consists in an industrialised housing system, focused in a medium socio-economical level, generally thought as a second house. This represents a demand that in Chile has still not been satisfied.

The house has to solve a double conflict. First of all, the house has to be able to compete with analogue constructions, and second with conventional housing. At the same time think the house as in its maximum abstraction without its context and with it as well. The construction proceeds its emplacement. Then the house arrives - as a ship - and it has to be able of assimilating the landscape, vitalise it and live with it.

It's about a refuge-house capable of satisfying the needs of the inhabitant, maintaining at the same time a modular and a repetitive quality that allows the construction to be founded anywhere in the country. That the same house could be in two different places of Chile and be satisfactory to the client.

Like a modern primitive house ("ruca"), with the tools of wood and prefabrication, reinvent the same principles of the twentieth century modern housing.

The principle that follows the project is the answer to the highest efectivity with the lowest amount of operations.

The offer that the system gives are restrictive, without discarding its growth by adding. The conditions of the geography and distances in Chile make necessary a system that it can be mounted by hand.

The assembling system begins with the wood structure followed by the "skin" of the house. Then its possible to work in the "body" protected by the weather problems.

The measures of the inhabitant, transport and materials are what finally give dimensions to the house. Structure, system and economy give the aesthetics.

Tomas McKay


During the development of the final project the student makes the connection between the academic and the professional world. This course will be a simulation of a project that should be as close as reality to our Professional experience.

The determining issues of the program (what), place (where) and construction (how) of a project are conditioned by the requirements of the client, the regulations the applicable laws and the costs of construction. These basic information, are the facts from which the architect gives limits to the problem that later will be solved in a designed form. The buildings generated that way, the projects already built should last more than most of the circumstances that informed them, should be lived and understood in different ways, maybe without the knowledge of this circumstances or forgetting the facts that gave it its origin.

The final project pretends to search the continuous way from the first expectations of a way to build until it's final horizon. That the analogy with the professional reality can be sustained if the final client has to be unknown and the investment is made by a supposed enterprise. The problem of the project will be in how, with the market rules and the actual laws, an architectural project can be generated.

Finally, the student has chosen a project that its program takes a place in the national market, justifying its merits as an investment and satisfy economically as a construction. Yet the project has been evaluated by its capacity of showing beauty, understanding this in the way that the piece shows its truth.

2001
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