Scales of Housing
2017, Columbia University GSAPPIn Collaboration with Michael Jongwon Choi
Critics: Daisy Ames
The site of this housing project is located in the Bronx, NY. The initial research into the context of the site revealed that the public school across the street from the site had a 40% homeless student population. For this reason, we chose to direct our project towards the lower end of the housing market. Our project proposes subsidized housing that caters for different types of households – from single adults, to single parents, families and extended families - to meet the different needs of the low to affordable income bracket.
The design of the project at the urban scale capitalizes on the qualities of a village typology with the intention of fostering the community that this typology generates. The village characteristics that we wanted to explore were – low to medium rise, scales of space from public to intimate, scales of layout and rhythms of circulation, nodes and public space. The units are designed with the needs of different users in mind, from individuals to groups, from micro to larger units and from shared to private units. The unit types allow for residents to transition between units as the need arises, this could be due to change in household size or length of stay.
To achieve the different rhythms of circulation that exist within a village we placed the units on a 30 x 30ft grid. Units shift within this grid to create hierarchies of pathways around the clusters. These slight misalignments within the greater grid allow for gradients of personal and public green space, and this dynamism of the plan is what helps to foster the community around it. The site was strategically designed to create districts within the ‘village’ block; to appropriately respond to the commercial and residential street fronts through the use of anchoring education and community facilities; and create areas of communal green and recreation space. The addition of tower blocks extends the village typology vertically and increases the site density. The site remains an open block, with public foot traffic mediated through changes in grade and the creation of green space.
