Instituto de Crédito Territorial’s Rural Housing and Modern Housing in Colombia

Abstract

The Colombian State undertook the construction of a significant number of houses in rural areas between 1939 and 1956 through the Instituto de Crédito Territorial. The rural housing program required abundant resources and posed challenges due to the country’s complex geography and its precarious road infrastructure, as it involved building single-family homes scattered across extensive rural areas. To overcome these obstacles and reduce construction costs, the agency explored several strategies, including standardizing housing typologies, systematizing gathered experience, experimenting with different materials and construction techniques, and implementing prefabrication methods. This text argues that these strategies, inherent to modern architecture, enabled, in turn, the construction of the agency's first explicitly modern urban housing projects. Reviewing this process thus contributes to expand the understanding of the genesis of the modern housing projects built by the agency in Colombia in the late 1940s, going beyond the narrative that these constructions were simply a byproduct of the ideas emanating from the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, CIAM.