As Gaston Bachelard had said that the flower is already preconceived in the seed; we imagine a built program around an initial predefined core that can grow until a program driven critical mass defines the saturation of all possible built extensions.
Progressive houses are a standard in urban and rural developments throughout Latin America. This work explores the potential of the progressive logic; it results in an architecture that is able to negotiate between the technical and the different social parameters in housing design and construction. It proposes single family homes in the tropics that can be adapted over time in order to adjust to changing family patterns.
A low cost prototype was developed and implemented for the individual families of the Sintiopia project in Nicaragua; the original configurations have been adapted since the beginning of the inhabitation process.
The work was presented in the exhibition series EW/NS 02 at the centre for architecture Arc en Reve in Bordeaux, France.
Credit
A Company (Oliver Schütte, Marije van Lidth de Jeude, and Jean Paul Garnier).
San José, Costa Rica, 2002-2008.