Comparison of housing construction systems in the huasteca zone: Vernacular, industrialized and hybrid. Study cases

Abstract

Currently, in the rural communities of northeastern Mexico, where the Huasteca Zone is located, there is a great diversity of materials and construction systems with which users have built their homes due to improvisation caused by the lack of resources to have adequate housing and lack of planning of it. It is common to find houses based on materials from each region as houses whose main inputs are already completely industrialized, in addition to a large number of houses in which the user made substitutions of materials by mixing elements of each system previously described. This document deals with an analysis of construction costs of three construction systems present in Huasteca: a house built on vernacular materials in the state of Veracruz, a house with industrialized inputs existing in the state of Tamaulipas, selected for their construction system and surface area among 120 sampled homes, and finally a housing prototype, developed by the author, whose construction system takes elements of the two systems listed previously, getting a sustainable project, to subsequently make comparisons of the unit construction cost of the three systems. It is alos calculated its depreciation due to their energy consumption, through a proposed energy consumption factor. After analyzing the budgets of each house, including the material, labor and tools necessary for its elaboration, it was determined that housing based on local materials is the most economical of the three, the unit cost of industrialized input housing is more than three times higher than the local materials housing, and the unit cost of the housing prototype described in this document represents less than twice of the local materials housing. Regarding their energy consumption, the best case is the vernacular house with the lower value.

Keywords

• Huasteca culture
• Rural housing
• Construction systems
• Unit cost.