ELEMENTAL is a for profit company with social interest, whose shareholders are the Universidad Católica de Chile, COPEC (Chilean Oil Company) and the Elemental founders.

Its field of action is the city: the development of housing, public space, infrastructure and transportation projects that can perform as an effective and efficient upgrade in the quality of life of the poor. ELEMENTAL operates in contexts of scarce resources, using the city as a source of equality, and moreover, as a shortcut to correct inequalities.

When Elemental began in Harvard University in 2000, social housing was associated with a lack of economic and professional resources that had generated a lack of options for poor families. Elemental wanted to change this negative association, using professional skills to work with social housing. Elemental now defines itself as a Do Tank that seeks to upgrade people’s quality of life. Our point was to generate technical conditions that can guarantee an effective process of gaining value over time. Without changing the rules of existing policies and conditions of the market Elemental develops and constructs strategic urban projects through the application of specific design criteria.
Three projects have been selected to reflect our work philosophy. Elemental Iquique was the first project in Chile that exemplified the application of the design criteria and confirmed, 5 years after it construction, the strong value increase of houses and the neighborhood. The other two projects represent two faces of our new challenge: to replicate the strategic points for confronting the housing deficit of the world poor. SCALE and SPEED will be needed to house the 2 billion impoverished urban inhabitants projected in 2030. The Prefab Prototype and Elemental Monterrey represent, respectively, the Elemental strategy to face this planetary scope.

ELEMENTAL’s first project in Iquique, back in 2001, consisted in re-establishing 93 families on the site where they had been squatting for the last 30 years with a budget of just US$7,500 per family. This opportunity allowed ELEMENTAL to test the previously developed design criteria for ensuring the value appreciation of each unit so that social housing could become a social investment instead of a social expense. Success was achieved by clearly identifying the restrictions and then working with the families themselves in participative workshops, proving feasibility on a local level. The results?  People were able to double the square meters of their initial homes (36 square meters) for only US$1.000 each. 5 years later, any house in the Elemental Iquique project is now valued at over US$20.000.

In 2030, the population of the world living in cities will grow from 3 to 5 billion with 2 billion of these inhabitants living below the poverty line. The equation that the world needs to solve: to build a 1-million-inhabitant city per week for the next 20 years with $10,000 dollars per family. Elemental is working on a “scale and speed strategy” oriented to share its experience and quality standards with poor communities around the world.

SCALE. Resolving the equation of the world poor requires a massiveness of scale that can only be achieved by worldwide cooperation of transferring technology. ELEMENTAL is committed to developing projects together with local builders and governments around the world, transmitting their experience through specific projects. For example, they have partnered with Make It Right Foundation-New Orleans, the City of Sao Paulo or the Government of Nuevo León, México, to develop projects using ELEMENTAL’s design principles. In the latter, the Housing Institute of Nuevo León commissioned us to design a group of 70 homes on a site of .6 hectares in a middle class neighborhood in Monterrey. This project demonstrates the adaptability of the design criteria abroad with the added result of empowering the local building associates with the knowledge to take these same innovations and apply them themselves.

SPEED. The key to increasing velocity lies in prefabrication. Historically, prefabricated systems have been criticized because of their inability to adapt to varied situations. However, if the goal is to prefabricate a half of a house, this problem disappears. Each owner, when building the second half of their house, is the responsible for customizing the final solution. Furthermore, while the first half becomes more strategic (concentrating on the difficult parts of the house) it becomes more universal a well, justifying and confirming the advantages of prefabrication. These concepts have been implemented in the Milan Triennial prototype that can be assembled in 24 hours. This then led to the second phase development of the E-block, a second generation of prefab prototypes that with speed and flexibility can generate housing for whole neighborhoods with scarce resources.

ELEMENTAL is a for profit company with social interest, whose shareholders are the Universidad Católica de Chile, COPEC (Chilean Oil Company) and the Elemental founders.

Its field of action is the city: the development of housing, public space, infrastructure and transportation projects that can perform as an effective and efficient upgrade in the quality of life of the poor. ELEMENTAL operates in contexts of scarce resources, using the city as a source of equality, and moreover, as a shortcut to correct inequalities.

When Elemental began in Harvard University in 2000, social housing was associated with a lack of economic and professional resources that had generated a lack of options for poor families. Elemental wanted to change this negative association, using professional skills to work with social housing. Elemental now defines itself as a Do Tank that seeks to upgrade people’s quality of life. Our point was to generate technical conditions that can guarantee an effective process of gaining value over time. Without changing the rules of existing policies and conditions of the market Elemental develops and constructs strategic urban projects through the application of specific design criteria.
Three projects have been selected to reflect our work philosophy. Elemental Iquique was the first project in Chile that exemplified the application of the design criteria and confirmed, 5 years after it construction, the strong value increase of houses and the neighborhood. The other two projects represent two faces of our new challenge: to replicate the strategic points for confronting the housing deficit of the world poor. SCALE and SPEED will be needed to house the 2 billion impoverished urban inhabitants projected in 2030. The Prefab Prototype and Elemental Monterrey represent, respectively, the Elemental strategy to face this planetary scope.

ELEMENTAL’s first project in Iquique, back in 2001, consisted in re-establishing 93 families on the site where they had been squatting for the last 30 years with a budget of just US$7,500 per family. This opportunity allowed ELEMENTAL to test the previously developed design criteria for ensuring the value appreciation of each unit so that social housing could become a social investment instead of a social expense. Success was achieved by clearly identifying the restrictions and then working with the families themselves in participative workshops, proving feasibility on a local level. The results?  People were able to double the square meters of their initial homes (36 square meters) for only US$1.000 each. 5 years later, any house in the Elemental Iquique project is now valued at over US$20.000.

In 2030, the population of the world living in cities will grow from 3 to 5 billion with 2 billion of these inhabitants living below the poverty line. The equation that the world needs to solve: to build a 1-million-inhabitant city per week for the next 20 years with $10,000 dollars per family. Elemental is working on a “scale and speed strategy” oriented to share its experience and quality standards with poor communities around the world.

SCALE. Resolving the equation of the world poor requires a massiveness of scale that can only be achieved by worldwide cooperation of transferring technology. ELEMENTAL is committed to developing projects together with local builders and governments around the world, transmitting their experience through specific projects. For example, they have partnered with Make It Right Foundation-New Orleans, the City of Sao Paulo or the Government of Nuevo León, México, to develop projects using ELEMENTAL’s design principles. In the latter, the Housing Institute of Nuevo León commissioned us to design a group of 70 homes on a site of .6 hectares in a middle class neighborhood in Monterrey. This project demonstrates the adaptability of the design criteria abroad with the added result of empowering the local building associates with the knowledge to take these same innovations and apply them themselves.

SPEED. The key to increasing velocity lies in prefabrication. Historically, prefabricated systems have been criticized because of their inability to adapt to varied situations. However, if the goal is to prefabricate a half of a house, this problem disappears. Each owner, when building the second half of their house, is the responsible for customizing the final solution. Furthermore, while the first half becomes more strategic (concentrating on the difficult parts of the house) it becomes more universal a well, justifying and confirming the advantages of prefabrication. These concepts have been implemented in the Milan Triennial prototype that can be assembled in 24 hours. This then led to the second phase development of the E-block, a second generation of prefab prototypes that with speed and flexibility can generate housing for whole neighborhoods with scarce resources.