Named after its Dortheavej address in the northwestern part of Copenhagen, the 5-story building winds through the area characterized by car repair shops, storage and industrial buildings from the 1930s–50s. BIG was commissioned to design Dortheavej in 2013 by Danish non-profit affordable housing association Lejerbo, whose mission is drafted by Danish urban space designer Jan Gehl. BIG was asked to create much needed affordable housing and public space in the area, while keeping the pedestrian passageways open and the adjacent green yard untouched. Earlier this spring, BIG and Lejerbo were honored by the Danish Association of Architects with the Lille Arne Award for prioritizing the spatial qualities of the residences and the building strategy on a strict affordable housing budget.

“Our ambition was to create affordable apartments by the world’s leading architects. Together with BIG, we have succeeded in creating sustainable, safe and functional homes that see eye to eye with the people who live in them.“ Jan Hyttel, President, Lejerbo Copenhagen.

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“Affordable housing is an architectural challenge due to the necessary budget restrictions. We have attempted to mobilize modular construction with modest materials to create generous living spaces at the urban as well as the residential scale. The prefabricated elements are stacked in a way that allows every second module an extra meter of room height, making the kitchen-living areas unusually spacious. By gently adjusting the modules, the living areas open more towards the courtyard while curving the linear block away from the street to expand the sidewalk into a public square. Economical constraints often lead to scarcity—at Dortheavej, we have managed to create added value for the individual as well as the community.” Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner, BIG.

The characteristic checkered pattern of Dortheavej is based on a singular prefab structure. Conceived as a porous wall, the building gently curves in the center, creating space for a public plaza towards the street on the south side and an intimate green courtyard towards the north. On the street level, the building opens up to allow the residents and general public to pass seamlessly into the courtyard.

The characteristic checkered pattern of Dortheavej is based on a singular prefab structure. Conceived as a porous wall, the building gently curves in the center, creating space for a public plaza towards the street on the south side and an intimate green courtyard towards the north. On the street level, the building opens up to allow the residents and general public to pass seamlessly into the courtyard.

The housing modules repeat along the curve and are stacked to the height of the surrounding buildings. The stacking creates additional space for each apartment to have a small terrace, providing a setting for healthy, sustainable living. On the sunny south side, balconies retract and add depth to the façade while on the northern side, the facade is even. Long wooden planks cover the façade on all sides, highlighting the modules and alternating to accentuate the checkered pattern.

Large floor-to-ceiling windows in the apartments allow lots of daylight into the units and outside views to the green courtyard or the surrounding neighborhood. The size of the apartments ranges from 60-115m2 and the materials are all kept very simple with wood and concrete in light colors dominating inside and out.

Evening views of Dortheavej situated in one of the most multi-ethnical, low-income neighborhoods in Copenhagen, show the building as light and transparent. Residents can look out from their balconies and the surrounding community can see the activity inside.

The small square created by the building’s slight curve will be landscaped with cherry trees and spaces for bicycle parking—the preferred way of getting around the city.

The north facing façade looks towards an enclosed green courtyard which residents of Dortheavej and the neighboring buildings can use for recreational activities.

FACTS

CLIENT: Lejerbo

COLLABORATORS: MOE
LOCATION: Copenhagen, Denmark
SIZE: 6,800 m2

BUDGET: 9.8 million USD or approximately 1,539 USD/m2

64 million DKK or approximately 10.000 DKK/m2

BIG – BJARKE INGELS GROUP

Partners-in-Charge: Bjarke Ingels, Finn Nørkjær
Project Managers: Ole Elkjær-Larsen, Per Bo Madsen
Team: David Zahle, Alberte Danvig, Alejandro Mata Gonzales, Alina Tamosiunaite, Birgitte Villadsen, Cat Huang, Claudio Moretti, Dag Præstegaard, Daruisz Duong Vu Hong, Enea Michelesio, Esben Christoffersen, Ewelina Moszczynska, Frederik Lyng, Henrik Kania, Høgni Laksáfoss, Jakob Andreassen, Jonas Aarsø Larsen, Karl Aarso Larsen, Katerina Joannides, Krista Meskanen, Laura Wätte, Lucas Torres Aguero, Maciej Jakub Zawaszki, Maria Teresa Fernandez Rojo, Michael Schønemann Jensen, Mikkel Marcker Stubgaard, Nigel Jooren, Rasmus Pedersen, Robinson Neuville, Sergiu Calacean, Taylor McNally-Anderson, Terrence Chew, Tobias Hjortdal, Tobias Vallø Sørensen

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The tiny house movement is taking the housing market by storm, with small homes appearing all over rural and urban areas across the world. They are an affordable and eco-conscious solution to the narrowing housing supply and can offer mobility to an increasing population of young professionals. Tiny houses come in many forms and sizes – from micro-apartments and office spaces, to cabins on wheels and trailers. Similarly, the financing models vary, depending on function, local building codes, size requirements and whether they’re made as commercial products or private housing solutions.

The best option is to design and build the house yourself, using savings instead of worrying about interest rates and debt. Some tiny house manufacturers offer in-house payment solutions to their customers. Other options are RV loans, peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding. We assembled a list of 5 beautiful tiny houses built for different purposes.

#1 – Llano Exit Strategy

This micro-housing project shows that building tiny houses can lead to creating larger communities, which offer affordable housing solutions. The Llano Exit Strategy development comprises four private houses and a shared building located on the Llano River in Texas. Four families purchased the land and wanted to each build small houses with a communal space for group activities. They commissioned architect Matt Garcia to design the complex within a $40,000 budget allocated for each of the private residences.

The completed structures, each with an area of 35 square meters (350 square feet) has a streamlined design, low environmental impact and responds to the harsh Texan climate. Galvanized steel was used for exterior cladding to reflect excessive sunlight, while spray foam insulation helps maintain optimal indoor temperatures during hot summers and cold winters. The sloped roof is perfect for harvesting rainwater, which is stored in large cisterns adjacent to each house. Polished concrete floors and plywood walls dominate the interior, with repurposed elements used for various fixtures and fittings in order to cut down construction costs.

#2 – Kasita micro-homes

This is a great example of academia being a good place to experiment with building tiny houses. Harvard researcher Jeff Wilson conceived Kasita micro-homes as a continuation of his previous dumpster experiment. His new micro-housing startup builds automated, movable, prefab 33 square-meter (352-square-foot) houses that can be installed in unused spaces or vacant parking lots. Each unit costs $139,000, which according to Wilson’s calculations, comes out to an estimated $800 monthly mortgage not including land lease costs.

Because of their modular design, the units can be assembled and combined to form multi-family houses, student housing and office spaces. The key demographic are mobile creative people who are increasingly less interested in building real estate and paying mortgages, but prefer mobility. The house can move with their occupants as they change cities and pursue their careers. They can use an app to schedule the move executed by the Kasita team. Each unit is a simple glass-and-steel box that can be inserted into a steel exoskeleton that can be built in under a week.

“Kasita is on the verge of disrupting the urban housing market in ways not seen in real estate and development in 150 years,” Wilson said in an interview for Forbes.

#3 – Getaway

Harvard Innovation Lab startup, Getaway House, builds and rents tiny homes for urban dwellers looking for an opportunity to enjoy nature and relax. It offers an affordable alternative to conventional vacationing, and allows people to find great places to stay in rural areas near major cities. This is a great example of finding a market niche and innovating within it through design.

At $99 a night, a Getaway stay costs about the same as a hotel, but in a fully furnished mini-residence that comes with fresh linens, shower products, and kitchenware, plus coffee, tea, and a variety of pay-as-you-eat snacks. At the moment, the cabins are only available around New York and Boston, but the team plans to expand to other locales.

The company has recently secured a whopping $15 million in funding from L Catterton, a private equity group behind many famous brands.

#4 – Woody

Brian and Joni Buzarde decided to build their own mobile tiny home that could follow them wherever they go. Their 236-square-foot trailer, nicknamed Woody, cost about $50,000 to build. The couple, both architecture school graduates, decided to design and build the house themselves.

They bought a 26-foot-long flatbed chassis for about $7,000, added structural insulated panels and cedar interior cladding. The height of the house falls just below the legal limit for highway travel that requires a special permit.

The interior is simple and modern, with birch-veneer plywood used for walls, floor, ceiling and kitchen cabinets. In order to cut construction costs, the couple chose to leave all the plumbing and electrical conduit exposed. It took them about a year to complete the structure, which officially became their home in 2012.

#5 – Rural Studio

A lot of great ideas for tiny houses come out of architecture schools. The small size makes them perfect for experimenting with different typologies, testing the market, and learning about the construction process. That’s why Auburn University launched Rural Studios, an undergraduate program that produced a line of tiny homes that can be built for just $20,000! These structures are built through the 20K House project, an academic design-and-build program that offers affordable housing for locals and is evolving into a commercial enterprise.

“Our goal was to design a market-rate model house that could be built by a contractor for $20,000 ($12,000 for materials and $8,000 for labor and profit) – the 20K House, a house for everybody and everyone. We chose $20,000 because it would be the most expensive mortgage a person receiving today’s median Social Security check of $758 a month can realistically repay. A $108 monthly mortgage payment is doable if you consider other monthly expenditures. Our calculations are based on a single house owner, because 43 percent of below-poverty households in Hale County are made up of people living alone. That translates to a potential market of 800 people in our county.”

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Have you ever considered building a tiny house? Let us know about your experiences.

The post 5 Amazing Tiny Houses and Their Financing Models appeared first on Archipreneur.

We first introduced The Starter Home* by the Office of Jonathan Tate to you in the article “Tall, Green, and Global: 10 of the Most Innovative Architecture Projects of 2016” and want to take a closer look at the building and the housing program of which it is the first example.

Starter Home* is an opportunistic urban housing program created to develop affordable living, entry-level homes for the speculative market that prioritizes: contemporary design that is site based and not prototypical; programmatic diversity to address a range of buyers, from first-timers to downsizers; densification through infill of overlooked odd or irregular vacant land; right-sizing as a means of addressing both environmental concerns and to insure affordability; in increasingly gentrifying historic core neighborhoods, a product that enables household economic diversity in rapidly gentrifying historic urban cores; and to do this without subsidization.

The Starter Home* program is fundamentally about using inventive land strategies coupled with design to develop homeownership opportunities in urban neighborhoods that, due to upward economic pressures, are no longer assessable to large parts of the population. The starter home moniker is important in that it clearly associates the program with a quintessential, albeit fading, component of the American housing market. Conventionally understood as monotonous, mass produced, greenfield development, this program takes a decidedly opposite approach of architectural particularity and urban integration to achieve similar aims. And, unlike its namesake, it relies wholly on design to set the development agenda, create access to land and generate the product. Without architecture, in this context, there would be no development.

The program is financed and operated by a working collaboration between developer, builder and architect. It is conceived as being applicable to many, if not all, cities. The first test sites are in New Orleans. Through a thorough analysis of land availability and market pressures, it was determined that there were opportunities with land that was too small or undesirable — odd lots — to attract first-wave developers. The design of the home works within and expressive of the restrictive conditions of the site, resulting in fitting yet peculiar new housing types for the City.

The first completed home under this program, No. 1, is located at 3106 St. Thomas St. in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. The site was situated between industrial warehouses and historic homes dating back to the beginnings of the neighborhood — a common condition in the fringes adjacent the River. The site is a remnant parcel long thought to be the rear yard of an adjacent home and measured only 16 ½ by 55 feet. With as-of-right setbacks, the footprint was limited to 10 ½ by 45 feet. The site was further complicated by being in a full control historic district with strict guidelines for scale and massing. The program for this initial house, one bedroom, one and a half baths with an office space, was tailored towards an individual or couple that, as a category, have found it increasingly difficult to locate available housing in this neighborhood.

The formal solution for the 975 square foot home was to use a staggered sectional composition that allowed the rooms to layer farther from the street giving an impression of a much smaller home. As a way to economize space, the side yard setback was used for entry and rear yard circulation, by way of an elevated deck, which was sandwiched between the home and adjacent warehouse CMU wall. The result is a narrow and tall structure that, through manipulation of the roof plane, is disguised from the street, read essentially as a low, one-story roof line, while the remainder of the home climbed up to the allowable building height.

Future Starter Homes* will continue to explore land-use, programmatic and spatial variations that position them as alternatives to the regimens of the normative speculative housing marketplace and we at Archipreneur are looking forward to the results!

Location:

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Project Data:

• Architect: OJT (Office of Jonathan Tate)
• Research and Design Team: Robert Baddour, Travis Bost, Rebecca X. Fitzgerald, Sabeen Hasan, Lauren Hickman, Kristian Mizes, Charles Rutledge and Jonathan Tate
• Structural engineer: John C. Bose Consulting Engineers
• Development Partner: Charles Rutledge
• Planning/Construction: 2015
• Residential units: 1
• Storeys: 3
• Floor area: 44 sqm (472 SF)
• Living space: 90.5 sqm (975 SF)

The post Affordable Living on Overlooked Land: The Starter Home* by OJT appeared first on Archipreneur.

We recently spoke with Jeremy McLeod, Founder of Melbourne based company Breathe Architecture.

In the interview he told us that in his career as an architect he eventually got to the point when he was fed up with property developers, off-shore investors and low-quality, expensive housing. Consequentially he and six other architects joined financial forces to develop the project The Commons.

The Commons survived the recent financial crisis and a change in investment to become a success story.

The Commons is an experiment in building an urban community. It could have only worked in a few Melbourne locations. There is no accident that it sits in the heart of old Brunswick – a melting pot of migrant activity.

At it’s core, The Commons is about people not architectural form. What is really impressive here is the way in which people use the building, the way they interact, it’s how they talk to each other in the lift, it’s their generosity toward one another. Could the architecture have been the catalyst for this outcome?

The design strategy for The Commons was to build more with less. To give people what they needed not what the marketing agents thought would sell.

Sustainability and affordability were approached via reduction:

• No cars
• No air-conditioning
• No second bathrooms
• No individual laundries / individual washing machines
• No plasterboard ceilings
• No chrome
• No tiles
• No toxic finishes
• No imported timbers

The planning was kept simple. Materiality took precedence over form. Hand painted signage lead residents past the fire sprinkler assembly, exposed and painstakingly curated, into the foyer, lined with a tapestry of recycled brickwork from the warehouse that once sat on the site.

Lift lobbies battened in natural Blackbutt and mild steel plate signal entries to generous apartments with a soft palette of waxed timber floors, concrete ceilings and exposed copper services. The northern apartments look out through a shipping chain screen, providing the framework for 24 Wisteria saplings to occupy.

Rooftop decks, surrounded by verdant plants overlook the Brunswick skyline to the city beyond.

Neighbors talk at the rooftop plots sharing tips on how best to grow their crops.

The Commons also demonstrates generosity to the wider community. To the west, the ground floor is set back to widen the compressed bike path, the light court and the rear courtyard are both handed over to the public domain rather than being territorially fenced off. These green spaces offer relief to the concrete and asphalt urban landscape of old Brunswick.

The goal of The Commons was to build a flagship of sustainable development. A triple bottom line development that could be replicable. And it did: It became the prototype for the Nightingale Housing movement, a not-for-profit social enterprise that supports, promotes and advocates high-quality housing that is ecologically, socially and financially sustainable.

Location:

7-9 Florence Street, Brunswick, 3056, Australia

Project Data:

• Architects: Breathe Architecture
• Planning / Construction: 2007 – 2013
• Residential units: 24
• Storeys: 4
• Gross floor area: 3,460 m2

The post The Commons – a Benchmark of Sustainable Development by Breathe Architecture appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Jeremy McLeod, Founder of Melbourne based company Breathe Architecture and the Nightingale Model.

Fed up with property developers, off-shore investors and low-quality, expensive housing, Jeremy and six other architects joined financial forces to develop their project The Commons. Its goal was to deliver livable, sustainable, and affordable apartments.

The Commons survived the recent financial crisis and a change in investment to become a success story. It became the prototype for the Nightingale Housing movement, a not-for-profit social enterprise that supports, promotes and advocates high-quality housing that is ecologically, socially and financially sustainable.

Today, Nightingale Housing has a number of houses in development, not only by Breathe Architecture but also by other architects who have been licensed the Nightingale model.

Keep on reading to learn from an architect who believes that collaboration can drive real and positive change in our cities.

Enjoy the interview!

Could you tell us a little about your background? What made you decide to found Breathe Architecture?

My parents were activists and I grew up in a family environment of protests. My parents moved around a lot so I went to lots of different schools. The things they taught me were, responsibility and the idea of sustainability.

I remember that my dad took me to the Old Parliament House in Canberra, which was 1,000 kilometers away. He took me there in a bus with a bunch of people to protest. We pitched a tent city on the lawn in front of Old Parliament House to protest around housing affordability in Melbourne back in the 1980s. So it’s ironic, right?

And then when I went to study architecture I studied an undergraduate in environmental design in Tasmania. Tasmania has this incredible nature and landscape. It’s very connected to the environment. Anyway, then I came to Melbourne with an architecture degree and an undergraduate in environmental design with a passion for sustainability, and I worked in a big practice in Melbourne. I worked there for four years under a great architect.

When I started at the practice, there were eight architects. It was a great studio environment. And when I left we were working on Melbourne’s – in fact the southern hemisphere’s – tallest residential building. The practice had grown to 50 architects. It seemed like the buildings we were doing were disconnected from nature or from the environment. The last project that I was working on in that practice was a car park for that building.

I left that practice and I started Breathe Architecture in 2001. And the reason it’s called Breathe Architecture and not Jeremy McLeod Architects was that that tower that I was working on had no windows that opened above level 30. So from level 30 to level 88 there were no windows that opened because the wind speed in Melbourne was so great that there was a fear from the wind engineer that it would suck furniture out of the building. So all of those apartments had to be cooled by air conditioning even though Melbourne has quite a temperate climate.

“So when I started Breathe Architecture the simple idea was that everything that I designed, everything that I worked on, needed to have a window that people could open so that they could breathe.”

Could you tell us about the beginning of the Nightingale Model?

As architects we gained knowledge along the way. We’d been frustrated dealing with property developers. Most of Melbourne… in fact, since the ’80s all the housing provisions in Melbourne are provided through the private market through property developers, building speculative developments generally for sale to investors.

85% of apartments in Melbourne are sold to investors, usually off-shore in Asia, so it leads to substandard design qualities. It’s a race to the bottom to build cheaply and to sell as expensive as possible. And we were quite frustrated and disillusioned with that. So in 2007 we built the prototype building for Nightingale called The Commons.

Melbourne, again, has a history of architectural activism. In the 1950s there was a group of Melbourne architects that ran a project called the Small Home Service, trying to deliver architecturally designed homes to the general population not just to the rich people.

In the 1970s there were two architects that established a company called Merchant Builders. Merchant Builders was about delivering design to a mass market, trying to improve the quality of design through mass-market building. But since the 70’s there has been not much movement from Melbourne architects.

When we started The Commons in 2007, I got together with six other architects, and we put together all of our money, borrowed against our houses, borrowed from other people and we raised about a million dollars. We started work on our own project.

It took us a very long time to complete The Commons, until 2013. It took us six years start to finish, because in the middle of that project there was the global financial crisis, which took our funding away from us. And so we had to change funding models halfway through and get funded by an impact investment group or an ethical funder called Small Giants. We finished that project in 2013 and in 2014, we started work on the first Nightingale project, which was the second iteration of The Commons.

We learned from The Commons and changed the financial model. Instead of having six architects, we had 25 ethical shareholders putting in $100,000 each, all borrowing against their homes. Melbournians that cared about the future of our city and the housing crisis facing our city currently, were happy to invest in a project that had a capped profit at 15%, a lot of risk associated with it, and some social return as well.

And looking back now, is the business model working out?

The reason that we decided to do this was out of necessity for our city, not because we wanted to take financial risk, not because we’re entrepreneurial by nature, but we thought it was necessary.

When we finished the 24 apartments of The Commons people liked it a lot. I think that it showed that there were people in Melbourne that wanted to live in something that was triple bottom line. Something that was livable, sustainable, and affordable. People started writing to us saying, “If you do another one of these can you let us know because we’d be interested in buying one.” When we finished The Commons we had 11 people on a waiting list to start work on the next project. The waiting list is now 2,300 something people.

We currently have 20 apartments buildings under construction. So there is lots of interest, there’s lots of demand, but we as a single practice can’t deliver on the needs of our city. So we established Nightingale Housing, which is a not-for-profit social enterprise.

The role of Nightingale housing is to share our intellectual property with other architects in Melbourne and other cities around the country to help them establish their own Nightingale projects and to help deliver the housing that people so desperately need here.

So we got corporate sponsorship. We raised about $500,000 from Cross Laminated Timber Suppliers, from sustainable appliance manufacturers. With that we could employ a CEO. We put together a skills based board. We employed a resource officer who could help other architects understand how to do the model. And then we put together a licensing committee. The chair of the licensing committee is the Victorian Government architect so the government pays her but she sits on our licensing committee making sure that only the best Australian architects can lead Nightingale projects.

Can every architect apply to work with the Nightingale model?

Yes, every architect can apply but not every architect gets a license, only the best ones do. And by the best I don’t mean the biggest. I mean the architects that have a proven history of doing quality work at any scale, that have a proven track record of not doing anything that they should be ashamed of, that have shown a commitment to either the profession of architecture or the broader community or society. So it’s a particular breed of architects that Nightingale Housing grants licenses to.

Further you created The Nightingale Night School. I read about a twelve-week semester during which students can learn about the philosophy and practice of the Nightingale Model. Who is the focus group of the school?

Ideally it would be to other Nightingale architects, but at the moment it has been run once to Masters of Architecture thesis students at Melbourne University second semester 2016. We plan to run it again this year and than hopefully every year.

Do you have any advice for Archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

I guess you have two choices:

You can sit there and wait for the phone to ring, for a property developer or someone with a lot of money to call you and ask you to build the project that you were born to do. Or you can take some financial risk and do the project that you were born to do.

And you would recommend the latter?

It totally depends on you. Some people just don’t have the stomach for it.

But our profession has been manipulated by property developers, project managers, real estate agents, marketing teams and lawyers in this country in the way that architects take all the risk but they receive very, very little of the financial reward associated with the project.

And often we’re asked to do things that we would be ashamed of. What good architects do is refuse the commission or resign the commission.

If you’re going to take all that risk to do a project that you’re not going to be proud of, wouldn’t you just take that risk and do the project that you will be proud of and that is beneficial to society and profession of architecture?

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

I think that technology has changed everything. I think that as a profession we need to think of ourselves as more entrepreneurial, whether we’re driving our own projects or whether we’re doing product design or whether we’re communicating directly with the residents. I mean, if you think about Baugruppen projects [joint building venture projects], it’s about an architect driving a project from the ground up and attracting residents based on their reputation: who they are, what they’ve done before, and what they can bring to the project.

I think that the future for architects, it’s adapt, it’s evolve, or die. The choice is one of survival.

We need to be adapting with the times rather than clinging to a 19th century idea of an old Englishman sitting in his manor drawing his beautiful plans for his rich friends.

About Jeremy McLeod

Jeremy is the founding Director of Breathe Architecture, a team of dedicated architects that have built a reputation for delivering high quality design and sustainable architecture for all scale projects.

Breathe Architecture has been focusing on sustainable urbanisation and in particular have been investigating how to deliver more affordable urban housing to Melbournians.

Breathe were the instigators of The Commons housing project in Brunswick, Melbourne, and now are collaborating with other Melbourne Architects to deliver the Nightingale Model. Nightingale Model is intended to be an open source-housing model led by architects.

Jeremy believes that architects, through collaboration, can drive real positive change in this city we call home.

The post The Nightingale Model: A Collaborative Movement for Sustainable, Affordable Housing in the City appeared first on Archipreneur.