Open Form: Oskar Hansen and Svein Hatloy’s proposal for PREVI — Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda — Perú

Abstract

The call for the housing estate of PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda – Experimental Housing Project), carried out in 1969, in Lima, happened in a specially fruitful moment of reflections concerning changes in architecture and, mainly, in cities. In this context of criticism, issues like citizen participation and the change in architecture over time became key. This was a process that strongly influenced the proposals of 13 international teams that participated in the call in Peru. This project lab, promoted by the Peruvian government with UN funds, became, according to the opinion of the authors of this article, a fundamental experience in social housing in Latin America in the 20^th century, concentrating seminal projects whose ideas still reverberate today. If all international architects who were invited to participate in the call already had, at the time, a significant repertoire in the housing issue, and were greatly in tune with the critical production of their contemporary colleagues, the Polish team, with Oskar Hansen and Svein Hatloy, brought to Peru a very peculiar work experience that they had been developing in Eastern Europe. Two structuring concepts of the practical and theoretical practice of Oskar Hansen and his wife, Zofia Hansen — the ‘Open Form’ and its deployment at an urban scale, the ‘Linear Continuous System’ (LCS) — appear in the proposal for PREVI as instruments for the search of a flexible architecture in space and time, open to citizen participation and intervention and adequate to their sociocultural peculiarities. Therefore, the present article aims at rescuing, through a more specific outline, the guiding ideas of the Polish proposal for the call and, in a broader sense, raising the importance of PREVI as a fundamental reference for social housing projects nowadays.