Abstract

Social housing refurbishment from an environmental perspective is an urgent necessity. There is a big percent of existing buildings and social housing stock that doesn’t respond to the specific local environmental conditions because their year of construction with expired legal frameworks, functionalities outdates, cheap housing or were built on scarcity contexts. All these examples have an enormous potential of adaptation and bioclimatic refurbishment it’s necessary to improve the living conditions. The dual relationship between energy and transitional space in housing is fundamental and should be reclaimed for the double functionality that these spaces do. We argue that transitional inside/outside spaces have the potential to be integrated as an extension of the domestic space to increase their socio-spatial and environmental functions. Under this logic, a progressive and low cost strategy is created and developed to transform bioclimatic and spatial solutions in a catalogue of adaptive open source small components. Therefore, the relationship between the existing and the new parts of a refurbished building need to be analysed and developed on conceptual and implementation levels. It further aims to develop a micro-architecture concept by integrating the prosthesis conception as a techno complementary element into the natural functions of building. Prosthesis is seen in these proposal as the injection of an energetic, socio-spatial and environmental patterns, as issues that are absent on baseline situation. Today, this project is being developed from a PhD thesis to a real “research by design” experience financed by regional funds from INNOVA BIO BIO Chile; and it is creating an incremental housing and open source catalogue of low-cost components. Keywords: Bioclimatic refurbishment. Incremental retrofit. Social housing.