Apan Housing Laboratory, by MOS

A campus of house prototypes explores solutions for affordable housing in Mexico.

Iwan Baan Aerial view of the Apan Housing Laboratory, which was master planned by MOS. The welcome and education center designed by MOS is at the base of the site, adjacent to 32 affordable house prototypes, each designed by a different firm.

Affordable housing—how to provide enough of it, and how to improve the quality of it—is hardly a uniquely American crisis, and nations around the world have different approaches to fixing the issue. In Mexico, the Institute for the National Fund for Workers, or INFONAVIT, was established in 1972 to help working-class and low-income citizens secure permanent housing. In 2018, INFONAVIT issued its 10 millionth mortgage—more than 3 million of which, according to a government press release, were issued between 2012 and 2018. But according to a 2017 World Bank report, “Most Mexicans cannot afford the cheapest formal house produced by the market. This type of unit (known as vivienda económica) costs around MXN225,230,” (about US$11,812 as of July 2019). The report says that the vivienda económica is affordable for households earning around three times the minimum wage but accounts for just 13 percent of the units produced—a result of high land costs in urban areas. The remaining units produced are more expensive and, to many, even further out of reach.

To analyze how to better serve its constituents, INFONAVIT’s Center for Research for Sustainable Development launched a program to solicit new approaches to affordable housing. Former deputy director for sustainability Carlos Zedillo Velasco, who studied architecture at Yale University, commissioned 84 design firms from Mexico and the United States to design prototypes for dwelling units optimized for different states and climate zones across the country; he was assisted in his efforts by colleagues including former manager of housing quality improvement, Julia Gómez Candela. To better understand the possibilities, and to better educate developers, workers, and students about the research, INFONAVIT engaged New York–based firm MOS and its principals Michael Meredith, AIA, and Hilary Sample, AIA, to help narrow the schemes to 32, develop a master plan for a campus of built prototypes, and design an education center to promote awareness about them. The campus, in the town of Apan, about 50 miles northeast of Mexico City, was completed earlier this year. (When Andrés Manuel López Obrador defeated incumbent Enrique Peña Nieto in the 2018 presidential elections, many of the stakeholders at INFONAVIT, including Zedillo Velasco and Gómez Candela, left, either before or shortly after construction at Apan was complete.)

Developing a Research Directive
Zedillo Velasco: When I arrived at INFONAVIT, the first thing I noticed is that the institute was financing a number of homes, more than 1,500 per day, but there was no involvement with architects whatsoever. As an architect, I explained to them the importance of having architects in the discussion of low-income housing. That involvement had stopped for several years in a lot of Latin American countries, but particularly in Mexico, where only politicians and private developers were included. So we spent a lot of time talking to architects about how important design was for low-income housing.

Gómez Candela: For almost six years, we studied the state of low-income housing in Mexico. We identified that under previous housing policies, big developers or companies could build the same house in Tijuana or Oaxaca, even though the weather, lifestyle, materials, and family composition and income [in each region] were completely different. We identified a big problem with abandoned houses, housing retrofits, and a lack of appropriate spaces in housing projects in cities. And there were no policies concerning rural or self-built houses, a complete disregard for city densification, etc.

Zedillo Velasco: It was really important to show how houses should perform differently from one territory to the next. We began a project called “From the Inhabitant to the Territory,” which started as a research process to understand the basic needs of people living in different towns across the country.

Jaime Navarro Walkway separating the welcome and education center designed by MOS (at left), from the house prototypes (at right).

Commissioning Designs for Change
Zedillo Velasco: One of the big mistakes we make when talking about low-income housing is that we try to analyze it as if it is a thing all its own. But, it’s actually just architecture and modifying territory. We need architects, academics, and researchers from a number of spaces to join the effort to figure out how to solve this issue. That’s why, from the moment we started the research, we thought that [the schemes] should be approached by different firms. I don’t believe that low-income housing can be replicated: There are things in the process that can be reproduced, but the idea of replication itself has had tremendous [negative] effects over the territory, culture, and sustainability overall. That’s why we reached out to many professionals, some who had past experience, and some who were on their first commission in housing. We wanted to look outside of the box. And by the time I left INFONAVIT, we had engaged with more than 700 architecture firms around the world.

Narrowing the Options to 32
Sample: The houses were originally designed with a small footprint, but the idea was that they could also be added on to and multiply themselves. We considered that in the selection. [The architects were] effectively designing a house for each state, roughly broken down to 10 different microclimates. Some houses have to really consider earthquakes, others had to think about heat and humidity. And they all had to think through conditions of culture—whether that’s issues around the kitchen, how you work outside, whether you have screens, or if things are closed up.

Meredith: We tried to choose houses that could be built [on a tight budget], but that also deal with typological thinking about architecture and vernacular sensibility—that weren’t trying to produce extravagant forms.

Iwan Baan Aerial view of the Apan Housing Laboratory from the north.

Crafting a Master Plan
Sample: INFONAVIT owns quite a bit of land in Apan, but a majority of the site relative to where we built already had housing on it. So, in a way we were somewhat limited by the shape of the rectangle. One of the things we observed was people walking across the site: It’s very much a place that is traveled through by foot, and we preserved that through the different paths that run through the education center. One of the most important and challenging parts was the organization of the houses. What we were most excited about is the way that they could interface with each other, producing social spaces in between where we designed small-scale landscape elements.

Meredith: In my mind, it’s between a Weissenhof Estate model of social housing and an expo, and the approach to the urban plan was to think of it like a kind of garden. We tried to keep the north orientation of the buildings like it is in their proposals. With this project, we didn’t really have to worry about property lines in the same way. Typically in Mexico the property line is marked by a fence or a wall, and then the garden inside is very inward facing. We wanted to explicitly make a focus on a shared space that’s not necessarily the street where the cars go, but a landscape space that people share. We tried to place the houses on the site according to the states that they’re designed for, so there’s a rational, didactic kind of organization. The understanding is that social housing is not a place for architecture, and is highly repetitive: There are acres of the same house repeated, marching along in a kind of grid—pure economics at work. The whole point of this plan is trying to present alternatives—trying to think about other possibilities for houses in general. It’s very optimistic and utopian at some level.

Jaime Navarro The welcome and education center at the Apan Housing Laboratory in Apan Mexico, designed by MOS.

A Place to Learn About Low-Income Housing
Meredith: The welcome and education center [at the entry to the site] needed to be a boundary and also be porous. It’s really a long building, but it’s broken into four pavilions, more or less, and you can move through it. It’s a dashed line—almost, in a way, literally. There’s a lot of connection between inside and outside in that little thin building. And we didn’t want it to read as an object like all the houses are objects.

Sample: We wanted to use local materials—the block we used was from a local plant, but we worked on changing the color slightly. We also wanted to provide a range of experiences through the building—from the shaded walkway, you can walk along and see all the different rooms, but also see the houses on the other side. We have rooms that have oculus skylights as large-scale openings, and we have real openings to the sky. The roof is accessible so you can go up and see the houses and the city beyond. One of Carlos’s mandates was that we had to have space in the building for a gallery to exhibit the drawings and the models [of the house prototypes]. The idea really is to bring students and others to visit.

Jaime Navarro View from a courtyard in the MOS-designed welcome and education center at the Apan Housing Laboratory in Apan, Mexico, out to the affordable house prototypes.

Designing a Living Laboratory
Zedillo Velasco: For you to be able to insert yourself into the private developer world, you have to prove that it can be done. That’s why the institute began doing formal research for the private developer to actually apply [in the field]. We were teaming up with several academic institutions around the world with the idea that private developers and researchers could go and spend time at Apan to discuss what was good and bad about the projects. And it could be a lab in which new technologies could be installed. So if someone had a mechanism for water conservation, they could actually go and apply it to one of the houses and measure it in real time, so that then some of these things could be applied for built housing. The idea was that it could be used as the main spot for people to go and question the idea of housing. To stand there on a beautiful spot and see that it is possible to do things differently.

Gómez Candela: The idea was to have students and architects live there and say, “Come on, these guys didn’t put something in the window and now the water comes in … so there’s a problem.” We wanted to make the modifications to do it better, and, if one [prototype] doesn’t work, to destroy it and build another version. The idea was to start making a living project of social housing and research.

Jaime Navarro Classroom in the welcome and education center at the Apan Housing Laboratory in Apan, Mexico, designed by MOS.

Creating an Open-Source Library of Designs
Zedillo Velasco: The project started before the earthquakes in September [2017]. After, there was a lack of projects for reconstruction, and we had already done a lot of research about how to build. I think [making the designs available for free download on INFONAVIT’s website] is a perfect way to be transparent about research—just putting it on public platforms to understand that the digital object can reach people much faster, in terms of actual construction. And that was the motive behind making these prototypes. The [online] library [of designs] made INFONAVIT the biggest housing and urban library in Mexico within a couple years.

Gómez Candela: We have some examples in Durango, a state in middle of the country, of a design [that someone downloaded and built]. They sent us photos. So people are doing construction themselves, and taking part with their families—it’s very, very nice.

Jaime Navarro Garden with water tower at the Apan Housing Laboratory in Apan, Mexico. Welcome and education center can be seen beyond at right.

The Apan Housing Laboratory’s Legacy
Sample: It would be exciting to think about a program that they could develop that drew people for conferences, symposiums, and residencies. Being so close to Mexico City and all of the people there working on issues of housing—from the U.N., to INFONAVIT, and others—it seems apt that this would be a place for success. Time will tell.

Zedillo Velasco: I heard that [the new administration] has good plans for [the Apan site]—they are engaging a lot of universities. And I think they have the most beautiful task. We were sitting in the lab, trying to find a cure, and a lot of those houses could be the cure for a lot of cities. Now they [the new administration] have the possibility of taking the medicine to the city. I think what this exercise proves is that housing, with basic budget restraints, could be better than what we have. And that’s a beautiful proposition. I think it’s a terrific start for good things to happen.

Project Credits
Project: Housing No. 8 (Laboratorio de Vivienda)
Location: Apan, Hidalgo, Mexico
Client: Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (INFONAVIT) / Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo Sostenible (CIDS)
Architect: MOS, New York . Michael Meredith, AIA, Hilary Sample, AIA (principals); Cyrus Dochow, Paul Ruppert (project architects); Fancheng Fei, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Mark Kamish (project team)
Signage: Studio Lin
Size: 8,600 square feet (education and welcome center); 9 acres (master plan)
Cost: Withheld

The Buildings