This housing crisis intensified during the pandemic, hitting hard those families who had to balance working from home, the children's education and their own entertainment, so as to not fall into the tedium that being locked up at home for so long can cause.

This was the problem that led students Valentina Lopez and Trinidad Alvarado to think about how to optimize the spaces of these houses. To do so, they decided to make wood the main focus of their project, which was titled "MUSU - Multi Surfaces SERVIU Houses". They chose wood for three reasons: its structural/material qualities, its great aesthetic value and finally, its affordability. 

As for the structure of the new module in the houses, it was designed to be inserted into the walls of the dining room/kitchen by means of pre-constructed metal profiles, which will unite with different cuts of timber, joined by metal parts such as ball joints, fasteners and shafts. The deployment, extension and rotation of the different areas allow the spaces to be multifunctional. For Trinidad Alvarado: "Wood in this project is fundamental to generating the warmth of a house where multiple users coexist. It also provides a biodegradable and environmentally friendly support, so that, in the future, it can be disposed of in a conscious way. For the project we thought of using native timber, such as oak, walnut, and raulí, among others".  

This is how this intervention in the SERVIU house models would create a redistribution of the spaces in the home, replacing the traditional walls with a multipurpose device made of timber. The students' project had such an impact that it even won third place in the Wood Week Design Contest last year. This is undoubtedly an impressive project that continues the tradition of rethinking how we build traditional middle- and lower-income housing in Chile.