Abstract:
Affordable housing is a housing project which serves as a recommendation to the government of Nigeria and as an alternative to the present approach of solving Nigeria's massive urban housing problem. It is the opinion of this thesis that these types of housing should be located close to the workplace of the inhabitants since this will reduce the time and cost of commuting to work but, just as important, it will encourage cooperation within the community itself. As a result of the latter probability, house clusters were adopted as the most appropriate approach to achieve this goal.It is also the opinion of this thesis that while the government supplies the necessary infrastructure at the site, the people who will be moving into this project should be given the freedom to be involved in both the design and construction phases that are within the traditional rural building vernacular of Nigeria. This thesis suggests that the proposed site be leased to the new inhabitants with eventual rights of ownershipSince the identification of a boundary by the use of a wall is a strong element of design definition, as well as security in Nigeria, each project is approached through a major gateway which then leads to a cluster gateway and, eventually, to the individual home.Efforts are made to minimize the amount of concrete surfaces on site, since concrete will add to the amount of heat radiated in the site. Instead, trees like coconut, palm, and mangoes, together with grass, should be utilized to provide the principal building elements.This design recommends the use of concrete blocks with a brick curtain wall to provide a natural appearance. Fencing should be of bamboo while the windows and doors are louvered. The roof is of corrugated aluminum sheets or asbestos cement sheets to reflect heat away from the building, and each house has a total of 1280 square feet of ground, of which 952, 1042, 1742, and 2084 square feet are the actual houses for one-, two-, three- and four-bedrooms respectively, the last two designs having second floors. At $20.00 per square foot, the one- and two-bedroom homes would cost $19,040 and $20,840 respectively.
