Row Houses in Curepipe (Cite Malherbes)
Row Houses (or what is commonly known as lakaz Cité) in Mauritius was a scheme created by the Government so as to provide (at very low cost) decent and habitable housing for people who are low on the social ladder. Basically, a rowhouse is one of a group of low-rise residential buildings that shares one or both side walls and a roofline with the structures next door. As the name indicates, all the houses are arranged in a row, perfectly aligned next to each other. The lakaz cite are normally constructed on the outskirts and in the shadows of cities/towns/villages. In this piece of writing, I will be considering Cite Malherbes, which is found in between Curepipe and Wooton, Mauritius.
Row houses in Mauritius have bad reputation in terms of wild construction that has a mushroom growth, which gets denser and denser, in proportion with the number of inhabitants in the cite. As a butterfly effect, this leads to a congestion of space, with little or no privacy. As Aravena says on Rio de Janero favela: “There are forces there that we should be able to channel through design.”
Cité Malherbes was constructed in the late 1980’s, and since that time, the lakaz cité have been evolving since then. But first thing first, let me give you a brief description of the dwellings: we can easily recognise the lakaz cité by the low height of the houses, most certainly done to decrease the cost of construction, and the poor tiny iron windows and a thin glass panel. The size of a Cité Malherbes house is about six metres wide, with no yard or little yard. The surface of the walls was never plastered perfectly but roughly just to avoid water penetration inside of the house. The architecture of those houses constructed at that time could be a mixture of both Georgian and Dutch architecture.
With time, those houses, as said earlier, evolved: inhabitants started to construct more and more to accommodate their family and other generations, leading to an over development of the area. Except from that, some of the houses still keep their more or less original architecture, which I personally think that should be kept as a museum-worthy relic.
Row houses in Mauritius have bad reputation in terms of wild construction that has a mushroom growth, which gets denser and denser, in proportion with the number of inhabitants in the cite. As a butterfly effect, this leads to a congestion of space, with little or no privacy. As Aravena says on Rio de Janero favela: “There are forces there that we should be able to channel through design.”
Cité Malherbes was constructed in the late 1980’s, and since that time, the lakaz cité have been evolving since then. But first thing first, let me give you a brief description of the dwellings: we can easily recognise the lakaz cité by the low height of the houses, most certainly done to decrease the cost of construction, and the poor tiny iron windows and a thin glass panel. The size of a Cité Malherbes house is about six metres wide, with no yard or little yard. The surface of the walls was never plastered perfectly but roughly just to avoid water penetration inside of the house. The architecture of those houses constructed at that time could be a mixture of both Georgian and Dutch architecture.
With time, those houses, as said earlier, evolved: inhabitants started to construct more and more to accommodate their family and other generations, leading to an over development of the area. Except from that, some of the houses still keep their more or less original architecture, which I personally think that should be kept as a museum-worthy relic.
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