Creating Communities And Homes ALL Residents Are Proud Of
Getting on for a hundred years ago, America made a tragic mistake when designing a housing program to help out citizens who were suffering during the Great Depression.
The original...
Homeless/Unhoused: Potato/Potahto, A Spreading Human Catastrophe
The word 'homeless' is undergoing something of a redefinition, replaced by the word 'unhoused' by some people. Is the intent to assist those people who are safely housed to...
Two Architects Taking Design To Where It Is Needed
Students enter architecture programs for different reasons. This post reports on the work of two people, Adi Kumar and Wanda Dalla Costa, who are steering the profession of architecture...
When The Housing Doesn’t Fit — Tales of Housing Innovation
In 2022, people at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) had an epiphany. Their signature annual publication, The State of the Nation's Housing, was issuing a consistent...
Future Social Housing: Why Beauty Should Bite The Beast
The demands and destruction of World War II led to a postwar social housing era that placed expediency and affordability ahead of graceful architectural objectives. The result: massive postwar...
dezeen: Is Housing That Everyone Can Afford The Solution To A World Housing Crisis?
The architecture magazine dezeen has a bee in its bonnet about social housing, to the point of proposing a world-wide Social Housing Revival. The foundations of dezeen's interest and...
Advice From An Expert On Making Housing Accessible For Canadians
In 2021, Thea Kurdi made a presentation to students at the University of Waterloo’s School of ArchitectureThe presentation was timely then because Canada had passed the Accessible Canada Act...
Tomorrow’s Accessible Housing: Priority Problems We Just Can’t See
Helen CastleCastle is the Director of Publishing and Learning Content at the Royal Institute of British Architects. kicks off an article in RIBAJ, the Royal Institute of British Architects'...
Hong Kong : World Wide Social Housing Possibilities From An Inspired Past
Needs must. The needs for affordable housing worldwide has triggered a world of different results, much of it inspired by capitalist free enterprise necessity, not as an oft-derided 'entitlement'...
Social Housing Architecture Apostles: Why Nix It When You Can Fix It?
Do you remember Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who in 2021 won what's considered to be the 'Nobel Prize For Architecture' — the 2021 Pritzker PrizeTry: Public Housing, “Reverence...
Updated – Architects Design Buildings To Welcome People Shunned By Society
In July this year, we published a story about trauma informed architecture. Now we have another. Why so soon?
This time, there is another linked article that adds new information...
UK Social Housing & Communities: Time Again For All Hands On Deck?
There is currently some discussion of the idea — nay, even importance — of the value of 'community' within UK housing. This post ultimately targets a discussion about the...
Housing Design With Human Connection In Mind
A journalist in the United Kingdom, David Ramsay, makes the case that community planning needs to give more attention to connections between neighbours. He argues that if we do,...
Architects Design Buildings To Welcome People Shunned By Society
Architecture has been used to rebuff groups of people who society considers undesirableTry: Spotting Architecture That Encourages Homeless People To ‘Move On’ and Is There a Difference Between Hostile...
Regulations That Trip Up Affordable Housing Design
You know, for such a small planet, we can be pretty blind to opportunities. Take housing design for example. For reasons that are explained in the article linked to...
Can the Human Right To Adequate Housing Include Bits Of ‘Unhousing?’
"Adequate" can be a vague term when not supported by a more detailed explanation of what what it actually means. 'Has a roof?' Well of course, in that particular...
Lived Experience Tenants Say: ‘One Size Fits All’ Is A Public Housing Bad Idea
Ask movers and shakers among North American public housing activists about their thinking on the grandest scale: what's new? The top of the pops these days is a 'retro'...
Santa Barbara Architecture Gives Life to US ‘Social’ Housing Ambitions
Over the last couple of years, there have been whispers of hope for a reboot of government built, deeply affordable housing in America.
Nobody will miss the face of American...
Housing Community Design: ‘Right To Contribute’ Beyond ‘Right To Be Heard’
Victor Body-Lawson heads an architecture studio that designs affordable housing in the United States and Africa. He describes a recent moment of pleasure when he read a housing proposal...
Bard Architecture Course Rattles The Cage Of ‘Style’
In an attempt to discover some useful architectural designs to enhance the quality of new-build social housing, the writer of this post encountered the following sentence:
"The size of the...
Disconnecting Housing Policy From Racism And Discrimination
Sophie House and Krystle Okafor are both based at New York University. Building on the work of contemporary abolitionistsAbolitionism is often understood to be about the abolition of slavery...
Singapore: The Millionaires Row Of Public Housing For All
Most of us interested in the future of public housing have heard (possibly even ad nauseum) how a couple of cities — Vienna and Singapore — manage to provide...
Housing For All: Have We Abandoned The Will To Plan Utopia?
In a dog eat dog housing world, those who can afford housing compete in a low-choice social universe that offers the suburban dream home sprawl versus gentrified shoe box...
Los Angeles Looks For Middle Between NIMBY And YIMBY
NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard. Keep current by-laws. The neighbourhood is perfect just as it is. No more housing development, even though the city needs houses.
YIMBY — Yes...
A New Facade For Grim North American Public Housing?
America's public housing, born in the 1930's, looks refreshing to the eye even today. . .
What's wrong with the above sentence? By and large, the average eye sees and...
Does Architecture Deliberately Support Racism? MoMA Examines How And Why
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is currently exploring the "bad and ugly" aspects of racist architecture as a prelude to a celebration of the "good"...
Public Housing As Architectural Activism: A Sydney Working Example
From Sydney, Australia to Ontario, Canada: celebrating a new Ontario Association of Architects president with a Down Under query about the role of architects in public Housing. Are we...
23 Walls: Different Brutalist Strokes For Different Low Budget Folks
Can flexibility added to brutalism be enough to make concrete walls into cozy homes? When the contest is fictional architecture,See: FICTIONAL ARCHITECTURE a real-life answer is not as important...
Thinking Big About Small Spaces
Do you want to help out the Extinction Rebellion by reducing your fooptrint on our planet? Have you no ambition to live in a multi-thousand square foot home...
Will Award Make UK Social Housing Tenants House Proud?
Some council house tenants in Norwich, UK, recently woke to discover they are living in homes with award-winning style. We're not talking about "top of this year's public housing,"...
Tory Solution For UK Housing Sickness: Take Two Storeys And Call Us In The Morning
What might those most concerned about affordable housing have expected from the recent Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, held in the shadow of a crash-out Brexit powered by a...
Computer Aided Affordable Housing: Why Modularize When You Can Prefabricate?
What's in a word? 'Modules' (or modular construction) seems to mean pretty much the same thing as 'prefabrication.' Aren't they both ways of describing some element of a building,...
Sci Fi Meets Congested City In Mind-Boggling Tokyo Housing Fantasies
1931 was a good year for vivid imagination in Tokyo. It was the year that kicked off future-proofing in that city, now the most congested urban space in the...
UK Heavy Metal Housing: From Solo Practice To Concert Perfection
The last few years have seen experimental 'cargotecture' experiments worldwide. The base of this affordable housing is the widely available shipping container, retired from seagoing duties but still full...
A Road To Housing Affordability Can Lead Through Climate Change
A scramble to protect ourselves and our environment from climate change will almost certainly spawn geographic and technological benefits that will can make housing more affordable.
A recent article in...
Houses Of The Future? Sticks Win Out Over Huffing And Puffing Wolf.
A seven story wooden structure built in Italy was rated strong enough to withstand a 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, which destroyed some 50,000 houses. Watch It Not Fall...
The ‘Double-Wide’ Concept Comes To Affordable Shipping Container Homes
In the tiny, affordable house department, shipping containers seem to be always the bridesmaids, never quite the bride. The public is periodically introduced to intriguing new designs based on...
NYC Plans To Shoehorn Affordable Housing Onto Teeny Quirky Lots
What do you put on a triangular handkerchief of city land that has been vacant for decades? If New York City finds the right design, it will be affordable...
Aussie Public Housing History: One Architect’s Championing Of More For Less
An Australian article linked below appears at first glance to be a 'sweep nostalgia away' anti-heritage, anti-sentiment dismissal of older architecture threatened with redevelopment. However, it instead turns out be...
New Phoenix Yacht Club Takes The Float Out Of The Affordable Boat For Artist Live-Aboards
Yacht racing has been likened to 'standing in a cold shower, ripping up hundred dollar bills.' Still, there's always the opportunity to save a dollar or two by living...
Affordable Apartments In Zurich: Neobrutalism(?) Rears Its Ugly Beautiful Head
A cynic might claim that, beyond an interesting design, there is nothing new in a Gus Wüstermann all-concrete medium-rise affordable housing project in Zurich, Switzerland.
The cement is long dry...
5 California Ideas For Housing The Homeless
A California 'homelessness housing' design competition has announced winners from some 53 developers who entered a Los Angeles County innovation challenge.
The winners are expected to use their prizes, which...
Alien Affordable Architecture, Modularity And The Challenge of Good-Hearted Politics
The Challenge:
More governments, both local and national, are coming to grips with an affordable housing crisis using the fashionable tools of the day. They are finding those tools wanting....
A Quick Look At The Future’s Self-Building Houses
Imagine a home that builds itself. Not only that, when brought to a site as a packed container, it is capable of unpacking itself without any power source, using...
Ottawa Architecture Student Explores Tiny Affordable Homes As A True Art Form
Not another tiny home! And this one on wheels. Isn't that what tourists drag around the countryside all summer?
Well, not quite. Not when it's designed by an architectural student...
How Can Architecture Bring Social Equity To Housing?
Amidst a growing affordable housing crisis, what does social equity actually mean? It's a slippery concept, though many would pursue it. Or at least they would pursue different ideas...
Idaho Company Mainstreams Tin Can Living
Homes built from sturdy but no longer seaworthy shipping containers have been, among other things, a subset of affordable 'tiny house living' explorations for a few years now.
Shipping containers...
Seattle Eyes Vancouver’s Modular Housing Attack on Homelessness
Builder, a construction industry magazine, predicted in March 2018 in an article — The Real Data On Entry-Level Home Buying Affordability — that if the conventional housing industry doesn't address...
Scarce Affordable Housing Innovation Gets A Boost From Famed Alabama School
In the United States, the mainstream private-enterprise building industry (let's call it 'Big Builder') is preoccupied with large, highly lucrative housing projects that range from market rate to above-market-rate...
Broken Promise: The Art And Artifice Of A Social Housing ‘Failure’
Robin Hood Gardens is demolished now, making way for high-rise towers, and 5 times the amount of housing. Half of that will be 'affordable,' but not in a traditional...
Steel Yourself For A Vision Of Shipping Container Homes
Shipping containers have been explored as a form of affordable housing for some years now. They are far from every expert's cup of tea, and face arguments that building...
Brutalism: The Demise Of The High Rise Live-in Parking Garage?
Who knew that architecture could warp the mind, pollute the thinking, cause people to sink into poverty and condemn them to a life of crime? That seemed to be...
Low Income Housing Must Be Designed Not Only For Economy, But For Human Dignity: Los Angeles Architects
In a Los Angeles region of ten million people, homelessness increased substantially in 2015 to top 47,000 people. Recognizing that housing for people experiencing homelessness is a major architectural...
