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CURATING THE LOCAL by Brian Phillips, FAIA, Founding Principal & Creative Director, ISA and Deb Katz, AIA, Principal, ISA
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SA’s design practice is rooted in the local conditions of the Philadelphia context—its physical patterns, cultural history, zoning codes, construction costs, consumer market and climate. The studio’s inquiry-based methodology looks to leverage the city’s local constraints as dynamic drivers of program, form and urbanism, generating unexpected solutions for a variety of building types. Over the past two decades, as the city’s population grew and its market generated a wider array of development potentials, ISA’s projects continue to refine their relationships to site and place while growing in scale and complexity. The following projects represent examples of highly constrained sites for urban housing, where sensitivity to context yielded surprising results.
TINY TOWER Early waves of redevelopment often begin on sites with standard dimensions, leaving behind the odd-shaped or extra small parcels facing alley streets. Unlocking the development potential of these leftover parcels can be a tool to increase the supply of low-cost housing for a diverse range of lifestyles. A client came to us with one such parcel—a vacant lot measuring just 12 by 29 feet—wondering what could be done with it. Even though the zoning code allowed an as-ofright single-family house with no associated parking, similar adjacent properties were being used as rear parking spaces for the homes facing the larger street on the next block. Further research into the site’s history uncovered the fact that a row PAGE 14 | DEC ‘21 | JAN ‘22
Tiny Tower, 2108
of classic Philadelphia Trinities—tiny row-houses typically less than 1,000 sf with single rooms stacking vertically across three stories and linked by a steep winding stair—had been torn down on the block prior to the sale of the parcel. Inspired by the Trinity typology—but looking to expand the traditionally tiny square footage to a more livable 1,250 sf —the Tiny Tower project used a carefully designed vertical circulation strategy to link six levels (including basement and roofdeck) within the 38-foot-tall zoning envelope. While Trin-
