When describing a sort of hierarchy of the 6 S’s, Stewart Brand wrote that “Site dominates the Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff.” [1] Skin is the layer of the building that meets the eye and covers the structure. Brand calls skin mutable. In How Buildings Learn, he demonstrates its mutability with examples of how buildings’ facades change over time. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it is common for houses to be built and occupied with very little in the way of skin, which is then progressively added. This makes the addition or modification of skin a very popular loan use for housing microfinance in Africa.
Traditional houses in Africa usually have skin. When the structure is poles, builders weave bamboo, reeds or sticks through them and apply a mud or clay skin. Plaster of one type or another is the most common skin in Africa, both on traditional and "modern" houses. It is indeed dominated by the structure, because the plaster (skin) must be of compatible material to bind to the structure. In some of my previous work in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ghana we built low cost houses using mud bricks as structure in communities where this seemed to be the most feasible option. The structure was then plastered with a mixture of cement and the same type of soil that made the bricks. Taking initiative in their self-help, clients would sometimes increase the cement component of the plaster ratio in the belief that it would make the skin stronger. The actual result was a plaster that could no longer bind to the structure and would soon start falling off. As the skin fell, so did repayments. Despite the fact that the clients’ actions directly caused the problem, the house design, selection of materials and technology and the overall process were ours and Turner's Third Law still seemed to apply.
In other communities where the soil was too sandy for mud bricks or where burnt bricks were an option, we built burnt brick or cement block structures. In an effort to reduce construction costs and keep clients’ income directed towards their loan repayments, we had a policy that houses could not be plastered until their loans were paid off. Complaints were seemingly endless when we (the providers) considered skin to be a luxury that a resilient structure made unnecessary. This was a constant source of conflict and we were ignoring a demand for skin as a loan product and as a key part of people’s housing wants and needs. Necessity and importance are not always the same thing when housing is viewed as a personal process as opposed to a shelter or commodity.
Skin is often a secondary or tertiary priority for households in Sub-Saharan Africa, after site and structure. It is extremely common for dwellers to move into a building before there is any skin except the roof covering. This is incremental building in action: An informal finance strategy that prioritizes available funds against housing as a livelihood component. Once the house is occupied, however, housing microfinance frequently assists dwellers to continue their housing process by adding interior and exterior skin. Plaster, paint, tiles, skirting, rough exterior finishing and embellishment on verandas are very common housing microfinance loan uses with demand even from very low income households. Skin brings a sense of pride to the dweller and adds a personal touch to their home that gives housing a deeper meaning than basic shelter. There is tremendous value in this as well as demand. Skin as a loan use is undoubtedly one key to housing microfinance reaching the scale needed to be sustainable and profitable.
My approach to skin has changed drastically over the years from the days when I was trying to enforce “no plastering” policies. Should we allow a household to use a housing microfinance loan to paint their house pink when there is some other item of apparent necessity still incomplete? Why not? They are probably more aware than we as to what is complete and incomplete on their own house. They probably have a reason why they want to paint it and we, as outsiders to their home, have little idea what painting their house pink means to them. Effective demand and a supportive, personalized housing process ultimately go hand in hand.
[1] Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built. New York: Penguin, p. 17.
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