Year 2: Society and Placeness

Core of Housing

Criticic: : Eric Bunge

Part r ner: r: E Eric Li L

Sememest s er: : FA2015

Sitete: : Mott tt Haven, Brononx, x, N New York City

Size: : 330,000 SF

Program: m: h housing

Model of three housing buildings with outdoor “streets” that allow visual connection to each other and to neighborhood. >

In NYC, you either have a balcony or you have a stoop— there are no porches here. New York is a porch-parched city. Real estate is simply too valuable to extend the threshold between your home and your neighborhood— your street, your million-fold city— much more than the horizontal distance required to vertically reach the sidewalk.

Stoops, elements of necessity, have developed an important life in the city as sites of clandestine urban interaction. The stoop begs a slower gait, apart from the impatient traversing of sidewalks. Stoops are not porches, but something more accessible. They do not invite visitors with a yawning wideness, they do not say come up for a cool drink and conversation; and so they do not turn strangers away. A vital trait in a city of strangers.

However, the stoop’s era has passed. Though their forebears remain sites of vibrant interaction and action throughout the city, the “stoops” of newer housing projects either lack this welcoming indi erence or forego the public space entirely.

Plateaus of visual and spatial interaction between residents of a neighborhood or city, and those who do not inhabit the surrounding area but are visiting or traveling. Like the porch or stoop, a place of mixing, on a larger scale.

Sprefeld’s infrastructure can be de ned two ways:

1) the buildings’ “core” - its steel, stairs, chutes and frames;

2) its copious mapped “option spaces” - large unprogrammed rooms left to the residents’ evolving needs and wants.

Sprefeld: cloudy and about to rain, set beside the Spre River in Berlin. Sprefeld is a Baugrupen (SP), a collectively-owned housing development model favored in Germany.

> BLACK indicates chases (for water and for trash) in Sprefeld’s three buildings; meanwhile, the common spaces are drawn as wall-less.

> Street wraps building - external circulation.

> and storage.

“shared”, communal spaces like laundry, and childcare.

Two Bedroom (Private) larger families

2 units per cluster

733 sq. ft. core/unit

32 units

Two Bedroom (Public) smaller families

2 units per cluster

503 sq. ft. core/unit

64 units

ADA Cluster

ADA, elderly

2 units per cluster

239 sq. ft. core/unit

32 units

Studio Cluster students, couples

4 units per cluster

207 sq. ft. core/unit

128 units

> Four unit types designed, based on Mott Haven’s existing and projected demographics, for the elderly, single-parent or two-parent families, and students or other young, transient populations. To reduce costs and material needs, each unit comes with built-in furniture - beds, shelving, some seating.

Apartments open themselves and integrate domestic life with commercial life, fostering community by remaining semi-public rather than sequestering their residents in locked rooms o of dark interior hallways. The spaces of the apartment range from commercially public towers, to shared communal gardens and amenities, to shared private kitchens and living rooms, to the “core” private bedrooms and bathrooms.

New York apartments have changed over time, becoming more standardized in terms of room size and layout. As minimal room size regulations have become stricter, rent on a ordable as well as luxury units has skyrocketed exponentially.

As an alternative model, the Sprefeld apartments in

Berlin allocate copious room to “option spaces”, whose programs are determined by resident agreement.

The Mott Haven neighborhood has a high concentration of single-parent households, as well as student populations attracted by nearby colleges. To serve the area, the Core of Housing apartment complex is designed to minimize rent costs and maximize community engagement.

The units for the Core of Housing apartments shrink the private “core” spaces, while allocating more space to communal amenities. By pooling square footage requirements, the apartments keep rent low.