Ilana Steenkamp URBAN DESIGN + PLANNING + ARCHITECTURE
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Speculative ABT Modular Units for Social Housing in South Africa, Jakupa
As a speculative project at Jakupa Architects and Urban Designers, in collaboration with PERI Construction, I explored a modular system in order to produce a range of apartment typologies, finding variety and differentiation within a system. This project is based on a monolithic concrete construction technique whereby the formwork can be reused in order to save costs and speed up delivery of mass housing in South Africa, while avoiding monotonous urban environments.
The units have been configured into an apartment configuration that illustrates the diversity of offerings from these modules. The building is designed to be 3 and 4 storeys. Storefronts have been incorporated into the ground floor, indicating how the units can be combined with other uses to create a vibrant urban environment.
The modules can be applied and adapted to multiple housing types including BNG and FLISP.
The modules can be configured to create interest in the built form and to allow for future growth and flexibility. This relies on the pre-construction planning phase to ensure flexibility is built into the initial thinking behind the design.
While concrete itself is not inherently sustainable it is explored as an alternative building technology. Concrete additives such as fly ash, a power station waste product in abundance, can be added to the mix, displacing as much of the cement as possible and producing buildings that are closer to the net-zero goal. The efficiency of the system comes with the production of the unit making use of the same metal formwork in differing configurations over a large scale.
Adaptable Housing units
The logic of incrementalism played a role in the development of the typologies. While the modules allow for variation, units can also be configured to allow for future growth where this is desirable.
