In the north of Lima is a housing estate that could have changed the face of cities in the developing world. Its residents go about their lives feeling lucky that they live where they do, but oblivious to the fact that they occupy the last great experiment
In the north of Lima is a housing estate that could have changed the face of cities in the developing world. Its residents go about their lives feeling lucky that they live where they do, but oblivious to the fact that they occupy the last great experiment in social housing. If you drove past it today, you might not even notice it. And yet the Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda—or previ for short—has a radical pedigree. Some of the best architects of the day slaved over it. Now it is largely forgotten.
PREVI was the product of exceptional conditions. In the 1960s, the population of Lima was growing so fast that government housing schemes were proving woefully inadequate. Instead, people were building their own homes in informal barriadas, which today account for more than half of the city. In 1966, President Fernando Belaúnde, who was also an architect, held an international competition in conjunction with the UN to devise a solution to the city’s housing problem. The list of participants reads like a roll call of the 1960s’ avant-garde: James Stirling, Aldo van Eyck, the Metabolists, Charles Correa, Christopher Alexander and Candilis, Josic and Woods. These are only the most famous. There were 13 international teams and 13 Peruvian—it was a housing Olympiad of sorts. Never again did so many prominent architects weigh in on the issue of social housing. The profession disengaged, eventually to discover the museum as the pinnacle of its ambitions.
The first day we spend at PREVI the sky is hazy, as it is almost every day in Lima. The light is as diffuse as in a museum, casting no shadows. It is forensic weather. These days previ is a gated community, but in the end everything gets a gate in South America. To our right we pass a football pitch and a playground. On our left is a little square with a tree and some houses with Po-Mo porthole windows. These are James Stirling’s. You can still recognise his single-storey design under the two- and three-storey houses that sit here now. The entire day consists of such moments of recognition. “These are Van Eycks.” “These must be Alexander’s.” It’s not always easy to tell, after three decades’ worth of expansion. The original houses are encrusted with geological layers: extra floors, pitched roofs, balconies, external staircases, faux-marble facades, terracotta roof tiles and bright coats of paint. It’s like a form of archaeology, mentally scraping away these accretions.
That was the genius of PREVI: it was designed as a platform for change. The houses were not the end but the beginning, a framework for expansion. It was revolutionary. Of course there was a tradition of the working class modifying their modernist offerings, as Le Corbusier discovered to his chagrin in Pessac, but it was never intended. The prevailing solutions to mass housing, the tower and megablock, were singularly inflexible, and they simply couldn’t be built fast enough or cheap enough. The barriadas, however, were starting to impress architects with their home-grown ingenuity, and PREVI was conceived as a formal version. The competition was geared towards low-rise, high-density concepts, and the architects were flown in to study the tvvv. Come 1970, after choosing three nominal winners—the Metabolists, Atelier 5 and Herbert Ohl—the judges decided to build all of the entries (except, ironically, Ohl’s, which turned out to be too difficult to realise). The first pilot scheme would consist of 500 houses, so that the designs could be fully tested on the ground, and in the second phase the best would be rolled out by the thousand. Except the second phase never happened.
For that reason, many considered PREVI a failure. Imagine investing in 24 different designs and construction methods—from brick to prefabricated concrete panels—in the hopes that the economies of scale would make up for it when the scheme was standardised. In the end, previ became an anomaly: a housing laborat