Pushing the frontiers in incremental housing

Abstract

Incremental housing has a long history. In many ways all houses are incremental as people always add and adapt their houses over a period of time. This fact, combined with the pressing need of starter homes, led many well-known architects such as Charles Correa, John Habraken and Alejandro Aravena to develop the notion of incremental housing as a fundamental design element in architecture. The idea for our project started with a steel house that was recently built in the Free State. Pieter Venter‘s house is a good example of practical planning and economical use of materials. We were marginally involved with the early conceptualization of this scheme and published a paper on it in Architecture SA (Raman, 2010:29). We suggested in that paper that it could be applied more widely in South Africa.