In twelve years Balaguer increased the amount of cement produced without reducing the housing deficit, and social housing continued to function more as a political argument than as a public policy
SANTO DOMINGO. – Between 1967 and 1978, on the land adjacent to the Hotel Embajador, the Dominican State built the project that best summarizes the contradictions of the housing policy of Balaguer's first period: Jardines del Embajador.
Designed by architect Pedro José Borrell Brentz, this complex was the first public housing project in the Dominican Republic to incorporate elevators, and its tallest blocks reached ten levels.
What distinguished it from the rest of the housing production of the period was not only its scale but its destination: it was aimed at high-ranking state officials.
The spatial quality of the units and the richness of the finishing materials used placed it, in the words of Natalia Ulloa Cáceres, in a category that could be considered luxurious compared to what was built in other projects.
The contrast with the working-class housing neighborhoods was striking. While in Mata Hambre and the General Antonio Duvergé neighborhood they were experimenting with simple, economical building typologies designed for low- and middle-income workers and employees, on the Embajador land, construction was geared towards those who had the financial means to find housing on the private market.
Ulloa Cáceres is direct in pointing out this point: the housing policy of the period did not conceive of programs aimed at fostering coexistence between social classes, as was done in the dictatorial context, but the model was one of explicit segregation, with each typology and each project assigned to a different socioeconomic profile, and a different location in the city.
The cost differences
Marcos Prados Martín's thesis on authoritarian modernization in Ciudad Trujillo states that the most affordable housing in the Ensanche Rhadamés, intended for high officials since the Trujillo era, had a monthly cost of forty-one Dominican pesos, compared to the thirteen and seventy-five that a house cost in the neighborhoods of Social Improvement near the colonial city.
This gap, institutionalized since the previous period, was perpetuated and widened under Balaguer. The allocation criterion was not need but the beneficiary's profile within the state structure.
The area where Jardines del Embajador was built was not chosen at random, since the area around the Hotel Embajador, inaugurated in 1942 during the Trujillo regime as a symbol of modernity and openness to international tourism, had been developing throughout the fifties and sixties as one of the most valuable land corridors in the capital.
The construction of a luxury housing complex in that area responded both to a logic of social distinction and to the dynamics of real estate speculation that Balaguer's own development model fostered.
The city was organizing itself around a new centrality that shifted the axis of power and consumption westward, and Jardines del Embajador was part of that shift.
The renowned authors
The architectural output of the second generation of Dominican architects, active during that same period, reflects the diversity of scales and intended users of construction in the 1960s and 70s. Architect Edgardo Vega Malagón, trained at the University of Santo Domingo and later in Italy where he broadened his knowledge through direct contact with the currents of the Modern Movement, completed works during those years such as the Alcoa headquarters in Cabo Rojo and the Superintendency of Banks, where he applied the concept of the open plan that he learned from Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.
Rafael Calventi, a graduate of Italy with experience in the workshops of Pierre Dufau in France and Marcel Breuer and IM Pei in the United States, designed the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic building in 1974, which critics have classified as one of the best architectural works in the country.
The firm Cott and Gautier introduced the parabolic roof solution to cover industrial warehouses and carried out the Shell-Conalco complex of 1965, which the essay published in the magazine De Arquitectura, of the UNPHU, describes as having a neo-brutalist attitude in the exaggeration of the structure and its nakedness.
These architects worked in parallel with state-funded housing production, but in different circuits and with different resources. The gap between the institutional and cultural architecture of the period, of undeniable technical and formal quality, and the social housing mass-produced by the state, reveals the extent to which housing policy was not prioritized as an architectural problem but as a political and economic issue. In this context, some housing projects of the period stand out for reasons opposite to Jardines del Embajador.
The neighborhoods of Las Caobas and Los Jardines del Norte, both built in 1978, at the end of Balaguer's first term in government, are pointed out by Ulloa Cáceres as examples of developments that used various housing typologies and that stand out from the rest for their adaptation to the physical environment.
In Las Caobas, the core of the staircase was used as an axis around which two apartment blocks were rotated to adapt to the ground level, while pedestrian accesses offered alternative routes to vehicular roads.
In Los Jardines del Norte, the natural slopes, the channels of the ravines and the abundant vegetation of the area were respected, generating what Ulloa Cáceres describes as a local version of a low-rise, medium-density garden city, about which he points out that it would be worthwhile to carry out a specific study.
These two cases are exceptions within a period dominated by the logic of typological reproduction and speed of execution. In 1978, when the Dominican Revolutionary Party came to power with Antonio Guzmán Fernández as president, Balaguer's policy of construction came to a provisional end.
The twelve years of his term had physically transformed Santo Domingo in an irreversible way, but the housing deficit had not decreased.
The city had grown in on itself and outwards, consuming agricultural land, displacing communities, and building avenues that bisected neighborhoods. In this process, social housing had served more as a political argument and economic engine than as a response to a need.
Series: History of social housing in the Dominican Republic. (Chapter IX).
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