The Owner Built Home & Homestead
(Page 5 of 23)
My limited experience in the building design and
construction field in this country has taught me one very
important lesson; satisfactory progress with the low-cash
cost, owner-built home can come only after an entirely new
approach to materials, structure, finished appearance and
the occupants' basic pattern of living. I view our existing
ego-inflated, overmaterialistic and downright absurd
housing forms as gross impediments to the sort of rational
and economic building that is actually possible and
desirable. But to find intelligence in housing
today one must go to the countries which, out of sheer
necessity, are beginning to approach the housing problem at
its roots.
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In Asia, for instance, 150 million families live in
overcrowded and unsanitary quarters. Some countries, like
India, are attacking this situation with energy and
imagination. A series of Aided Self-Help programs are
included in the Indian government's three-year Community
Development plan. At the International Exhibition on Low
Cost Housing held at New Delhi a few years ago, a complete
model village was on display. Over 30,000 people visited
this village each day; it proved to be the most successful
low cash-cost demonstration center in the world. None of
the dwellings in this village cost over $1,000. Besides the
wide variety of domestic buildings, the village contained a
school, health clinic, co-op store, carpentry shop and
smithy. The village was laid out with proper regard to
water supply, drainage, lighting and street planning. This
demonstration center also illustrated the wide variety of
low cash-cost materials available; reeds, aluminum, gypsum,
hessian, rammed earth, and concrete—employed in new
and more imaginative ways.
The new structural ideas, uses of materials, and methods of
design that result from an effort such as the New Delhi
Exhibition mark a tremendous architectural
advance—but the human advance behind the
scenes is even greater. The best thinkers in their
field have been on the job. Men like Kurt Billig, director
of the Central Building Research Institute (Roorkee), A. L.
Glen, (Pretoria), and G. F. Middleton, Commonwealth
Experimental Building Station (North Ryde, New South Wales,
Australia) could command the highest fees from those most
able to pay. Instead, they contribute their vast store of
building knowledge and imagination to the greatest housing
needs of our age. Architect Joseph Allen Stein, head of the
Dept. of Architecture at Bengal (India) Engineering
College, summed up my sentiments in effect when he made the
following statement at the New Delhi exhibition:
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