Deputy Director, Sarah Watson, will be featured on a panel during Dwell on Design.
Date:Saturday, October 11, 2014-4:00pm to 5:00pm

About the panel:
“Micro-housing is the trend du jour—instead of expansive loft spaces, we’re seeing a shift toward city-led social housing competitions and developer-built condo towers with units marketed toward single occupants. Most New Yorkers live somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, packing into spaces between 500 and 1,000 square feet. Dwell invites David Friedlander of LifeEdited (whose Brooklyn apartment was featured in Dwell’s September 2014 issue), architect Michael Chen of Normal Projects, and Sarah Watson, deputy director of Citizens Housing Planning Council, to a conversation about making the most of limited square footage.”

Register for Dwell on Design here.

Film-maker Joanna Arnow has made this incredible short film on last year’s Making Room exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Watch and enjoy!

Making Room has spread outside of New York City over the last few years, including inspiring a new graduate research + design studio at the Georgia Tech School of Architecture entitled 21st Century Housing: Making Room in the Contemporary City.

As a part of that innovative studio, Sarah Watson of CHPC was invited to visit Dwell on Design LA at the Los Angeles Convention Center where the Georgia Tech team were showcasing the students work, announcing the winner of best design over the last year, and taking part in an onstage program to discuss the Making Room inspiration behind the studio, along with sponsors Resource Furniture and Architecture for Humanity.

The Georgia Tech School of Architecture booth at Dwell on Design LA

Dwell on Design LA is America’s largest design event, with three days of exhibitions, education, technologies, onstage programs, speakers, and more than 2,000 companies specializing in furnishings and products that relate to design.

The Resource Furniture booth was predictably popular among expo visiters – attracting large crowds who were fascinated by the cutting-edge transformable furniture. But the Georgia Tech booth also had exceedingly high traffic throughout the event with hundreds of visitors interested in the details of the students’ work and their unique, fresh takes on housing design for our 21st century urban populations.

We were very happy to be there to experience the ripple effects of Making Room – and to see the great presentation by Stephen Taul of Georgia Tech, Lisa Blecker of Resource Furniture and Alix Ogilvie of Architecture for Humanity discussing this innovative design + research studio and announcing the student winner, Madona Kumar.

Stephen Taul of Georgia Tech discusses the research + design studio

One of the highlights of 2013  – a year jam-packed full of landmark moments for CHPC – has been working with the Georgia Tech School of Architecture in the development of a design + research studio for graduate students entitled 21st Century Housing: Making Room in the Contemporary City.

The studio, headed by Associate Professor and Architect Michael Gamble, challenges student teams to put together full design proposals for mixed residential/commercial developments that incorporate high-performance active and passive energy systems. The brief is already extremely challenging. They have to conduct their own site selection–picking sites that are not only available for development, but that will enhance the neighborhood and follow urbanist principles. They have to combine innovative architecture with cutting-edge building technologies. They have to conduct energy analysis to ensure that their proposal has zero net energy consumption and zero carbon emissions. They have to develop a financially viable building.

Georgia Tech School of Architecture design studio

Earlier this year, Georgia Tech graduate Stephen Taul visited the Making Room exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Stephen felt a strong connection between the Making Room proposals and the design + research studio undertaken by the Georgia Tech graduate architecture students. The goal of their studio is to develop fully-realized buildings that actually respond to environmental realities, as well as support the needs of 21st century city. The exhibition made Stephen feel that it would be valuable to extend this goal even further and to ask the students to also find ways for their proposals to respond to the ‘social and demographic realities’ of Atlanta – by incorporating some alternative housing unit typologies.

Atlanta is experiencing the same demographic and lifestyle shifts as cities all over the US. People are staying single for longer, which is reshaping household arrangements in radical ways. The traditional nuclear family household is declining, giving rise to a boom in single person households and households with multiple adults sharing. In addition, Atlanta is also experiencing a surge in demand for housing in the urban center that has good public transport connections and convenient amenities.

One of the proposals by the Georgia Tech students

Stephen reached out to CHPC to consult on the program, and we met with him and Michael Gamble to help them understand the Making Room principles and the strategies for demographic analysis that we have employed. And Resource Furniture, our partners in the Making Room exhibition, became sponsors of the studio, alongside the Alcoa Foundation, Architecture for Humanity Pillar of Sustainable Education, and Southface.

And with astonishing speed and expertise, the 21st Century Housing studio was developed in time for the fall semester. The first semester is to select a site, develop the general concept for the proposal, undertake demographic analysis to understand the lifestyles of the potential clients, and design the building and the housing unit layouts. In the spring semester, students will focus on the interiors and the materials for the building envelope.

You can read all of the details of the studio on their dedicated website.

On December 3, CHPC’s Sarah Watson was thrilled to be invited to be a part of the panel for their end of semester design review to see the student’s work so far.

The students and review team!

Sarah was deeply excited and inspired by the student’s proposals. Most especially, it was startlingly impressive to see such a confident understanding of the Making Room principles – about how housing and interior design can respond to demographic and lifestyle shifts. To blend this with urban planning, urban renewal, sustainability and urbanism was really exhilarating.

Many of the projects responded directly to Atlanta’s growing single-person households by developing well-designed compact apartments in dense buildings, for single adults of all ages. At the review, we had lots of fun debates about the accompanying communal spaces of such buildings, and management strategies that ensure their success. One student was so committed to housing for single adults that she did not want to be on a team; she wanted to go solo! She designed a highly dense building of split level studios which would have fit it well in our exhibition. And one team took the notion of ‘extra housing options’ so far that they created an endless menu of design options for their small studios so that they would satisfy single adults of all ages and backgrounds.

Team (of one) presents their micro-unit building

Other proposals reexamined the definition of a ‘housing unit’ and included live/work blended spaces, or accessory units that could be rented out or used to accommodate adult family members. The urban carriage houses of one proposal were an excellent idea to create a sub-unit attached to a townhouse.

Building proposal that would be seen in the Atlanta skyline

For more details on the studio and the review, read Resource Furniture’s blog here – which also takes a sneaky look at Sarah and Lisa Blecker’s downtime in Atlanta after the review (it includes a peek at Atlanta’s amazing food scene).

Keep an eye on our website for more updates on this program as the school year continues. We would like to extend huge thanks to Michael Gamble, Stephen Taul, Dr. Steven French, and the faculty of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture for allowing us to contribute to this incredibly exciting studio, and for funding our travel and accommodation to take part in the review. And – as always – thank you so much to Resource Furniture for their continued partnership, friendship, and support of the Making Room initiative and CHPC. 

After visiting the Making Room exhibition earlier this year,  Stephen Taul of the Georgia Institute of Technology was inspired that a design and research studio at the School of Architecture based on this initiative could be a great way to engage students as part of their interdisciplinary seminar: Net Zero Energy Housing.

Along with others at the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, he has put together a Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Design and Research Studio entitled  On Urban Dwelling: Making Room in the Contemporary City 

 The series of seminars and studios focuses on the design and construction of medium-scaled ecologically-sensitive residential developments.   Research into demographic change in sunbelt cities such as Atlanta is the basis from which the studio seeks intelligent design solutions to emerging housing typologies. Cities continue to move away from satellite single family bedroom communities towards center city, mid and high-rise housing blocks, creating the need for a sustained focus on what constitutes a viable public and affordable private realm.

CHPC is delighted to be offered the opportunity to visit the students who will be presenting their Fall semester work as part of a design review! Sarah Watson will be attending the school from December 4-5 and will report back with news of the students’ work.