Bee Breeders have selected winners of the Hong Kong Pixel Homes competition, seeking to address the pressures of expanding populations and urban growth on existing housing markets. The competition asked for solutions which would reconsider our entrenched conventional forms of housing with “formal, technological, and material strategies predicated on modularity and repetition”. In announcing the competition results, the jury applauded the exploration of density, amenity and public/private adjacency in the winning schemes, recognizing their consideration for novel approaches to domestic culture and tradition.
The competition winners, including noted ‘Green’ and ‘Student’ schemes, are set out below.
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An aerial photo by the US Geological Survey compares the narrow, monolithic blocks of Pruitt-Igoe with the neighboring pre-Modernist buildings of St. Louis. ImageCourtesy of Wikimedia user Junkyardsparkle (Public Domain)
Few buildings in history can claim as infamous a legacy as that of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project of St. Louis, Missouri. Built during the height of Modernism this nominally innovative collection of residential towers was meant to stand as a triumph of rational architectural design over the ills of poverty and urban blight; instead, two decades of turmoil preceded the final, unceremonious destruction of the entire complex in 1973. The fall of Pruitt-Igoe ultimately came to signify not only the failure of one public housing project, but arguably the death knell of the entire Modernist era of design.
The average cost of a home in London has now reached over £500,000 ($640,000), a figure far beyond the reach of the large majority of individuals or families on or below the average UK income (£34,473, or just under $45,000, per year). It’s a story which has been told time and again in recent years; the “housing crisis” of affordability continues to exacerbate the lives of a generation.
For Naked House, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to “stripping affordable housing back to the bare essentials,” crisis necessitates a creative response. With support and funding from the GLA (Greater London Authority) and the incumbent Mayor of London, who has awarded a £500,000 grant to the development, they—in collaboration with OMMX—have now made an important step closer to realizing their vision.
https://www.archdaily.com/869909/uk-naked-house-proposal-ommx-aims-to-bring-affordability-to-london-housing-marketAD Editorial Team
Beomki Lee and Chang Kyu Lee of Atelier L have unveiled their speculative project, Instant City: Living Air-Right, which proposes that affordable housing and public programs be built in the air rights of existing buildings in New York City.
As a response to the lack of home ownership in the city, the project aims to provide living space, as well as to foster community in an overlooked space.
First Prize: The Table Top / Lap Chi Kwong, Alison Von Glinow . Image Courtesy of Bee Breeders
Bee Breeders have selected the winners of the New York Affordable Housing Challenge, inspired by barriers faced by the global population in our contemporary culture of housing scarcity and economic deprivation. The submissions provide various multifaceted architectural responses to scattered sites of various scales around New York City, “redefining the culture, economy, and experience of urban domesticity by means of space, material, morphology, or structure.”
WXY architecture + urban design has unveiled its design for The Peninsula, a five-acre mixed use development for New York City that aims to “create [an] instant [community] with jobs, training, education, and hundreds of affordable apartments.”
Created in conjunction with Body Lawson Associates (BLA) for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and the Department of Housing and Preservation Development (HPD), the project will feature retail, light industrial, recreational, and residential space—all of which will be affordable—in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx.
Tamayouz Excellence Award is delighted to invite students, architects, and designers worldwide to design a prototype for affordable housing for the post-Daesh city of Mosul, which can be easily replicated with the objective of increasing the capacity of housing in the city and providing a practical and inspiring solution for returning refugees and internally displaced. he conditions for returning refugees and internally displaced are extremely challenging. The question of how to support those who wish to return to their homeland will become extremely pressing. Limited resources in terms of finance and land mean that carefully considered material and spatial responses are needed.
In honour of its 10th anniversary, the Curry Stone Design Prize will recognize a large group of the world’s most socially conscious and active design practices, in what the Foundation has coined as the Social Design Circle.
Over the course of the year, 100 firms will be added to the Circle for their sustainable, socially inclusive and impactful design work, under twelve specific themes. Each month, select firms’ work will be highlighted individually on the Prize’s website, while also featuring on the Curry Stone Foundation’s new podcast, Social Design Insights.
The following seven practices were selected for the month of February, in response to the theme “Is The Right to Housing Real?”:
https://www.archdaily.com/804554/curry-stone-design-prize-recognizes-7-practices-for-strides-in-social-housingOsman Bari
"It Takes a Block" Proposal. Image Courtesy of Kjellander Sjoberg
Stockholm-based firm Kjellander Sjöberg (K+S) won the Swedish division of the Nordic Built Cities Challenge 2016 with their vision to transform Sege Park, Malmö into a socially sustainable residential hub. Their project "It Takes a Block" uses climate-smart and economically varied housing models to test architecture's capability to foster sustainable living. The proposal was developed in association with students from Lund University and Danish landscape architecture firms BOGL and Sted.
Construct the Future asks how we can apply new perspectives and transform existing structures to provide living alternatives. The exhibition will be across three days in Shoreditch and is hosted by new affordable housing company Native.
Open to the public from the 8th-10th April 2016, Construct the Future will bring together interdisciplinary practitioners from around the world, including established and emerging artists and architects who have something to contribute to the ongoing discourse around alternative living. Exhibited work includes: a wearable refugee shelter; a sustainable living tower inhabited with edible plants and fish; a digitised 3D model that envisions new spatial possibilities; an interactive musical installation for the London Underground; as well as zines, poems, essays, films and illustrations. There will also be a noticeboard with details of collectives and organisations that deal with some of the issues surrounding affordable housing in the UK.
This event is the third of a series of international programs highlighting exemplary housing design around the world. MVRDV was founded in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The practice engages globally in providing solutions to contemporary architectural and urban issues. A highly collaborative, research-based design method involves clients, stakeholders. and experts from a wide range of fields from early on in the creative process. The results are exemplary, outspoken projects that enable our cities and landscapes to develop towards a better future.
Patano Studio Architecture has created a proposal for a 45-acre, two-mile park spanning over the top of the Interstate-5 freeway in Seattle. Called C.A.P., the plan “proposes a city-wide architectural infrastructure solution to multiple issues facing the fast growing city.”
Designing Affordability at the Center for Architecture
Designing Affordability: Quicker, Smarter, More Efficient Housing Now examines how architects, engineers, planners, policy makers, tenants, and homeowners are crafting innovative ways to reduce the cost of housing and increase opportunities by rethinking how we build, maintain, and occupy structures. Affordable housing is typically focused on ensuring that a family at a certain income can qualify for a housing unit. Affordability is a broader concept referring to lifestyles, incomes and how housing can be designed, constructed and managed at a lower cost.
Details have been released on a new residential project designed by ODA Architecture at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. Occupying two waterfront sites in the Pier 6 uplands development area, the project will include two10,000-square-foot buildings focused on affordable housing, community development and preserving the surrounding parkland.
Design Indaba, in collaboration with the C-City Design Museum in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, has selected Hennie Botes’ “Moladi” for their new exhibit: “Design For A Better World | Innovations For People.” The exhibit aims to raise awareness of the significance of design by selecting projects relevant to current issues worldwide. Based out of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Moladi has provided a solution to the problem of affordable housing since 1986.
Learn more about the construction system and its benefits for affordable housing projects after the break.
What some believe to be an act of revenge, George Lucas has unveiled plans to build the San Francisco Bay Area's largest affordable housing project in the wealthy community of Marin County. As CBS reports, the news comes just three years after valley residents shot down Lucas' proposal to develop the land with a 265,000-square-foot production studio. The new plan aims to provide veterans, firefighters, teachers and other service-oriented working class people with 224 low-income homes.
"We’ve got enough millionaires here. What we need is some houses for regular working people," said Lucas, according to his lawyer Gary Giacomini who also ensured that the plan was "not a form of retaliation."
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