Total Housing (ENG ED.)

Alternatives to urban sprawl
Albert Ferré

Total Housing was designed to be a demonstration of the virtues of high and medium density multi-family homes, and an antidote to urban sprawl. The selection of works in Total Housing (in hard copy and on its supplementary website: www.actar.com/totalhousing/) spans a period coinciding with the height of the housing boom, and consequent bust, experienced in most “developed” economies. From among the huge amount of projects developed in this period, Total Housing selects 61 of them from 22 countries which exemplify outstanding innovations in construction systems, layout of residential space, systems of unit aggregation, integration of the residential program into the other functions that make up our cities, and repercussions in the formation of the urban fabric. These innovations are summarised in a series of concepts or keywords that identify their “virtues” as a residential model on the first page of each project. This book is a design manual as much as a reference for future good practices. Its structure follows a simple sequential order of the number of homes included in each project (from 4 to 750), regardless of the other complementary programs they may respond to. This sequence aims to facilitate the identification of possible examples and case studies, and show that interesting design solutions are found in big and small projects alike. The final section consists of detailed plans of 17 of the works in the book.

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