Flooding, parking and lack of green spaces are only few challenges our cities face. And with the climate change we are likely to face growing numbers of cloudbursts. The young Danish architectural office THIRD NATURE, founded by Ole Schrøder and Flemming Rafn Thomsen in 2012, aims to adapt cities to the consequences of climate changes.

By stacking water reservoir, parking facility and urban space, the project POP-UP solves three challenges at once. As heavy rain falls, storm water fills the underground reservoir and the parking structure will pop up in the cityscape, highlighting the adaption to the forces of nature. THIRD NATURE has exemplified POP-UP in St. John’s Park in New York.

“With POP-UP, we have a humane response to man-made problems, that by combining multiple challenges in one overall solution shows the world how climate adaptation, mobility and urban development do not have to be each other’s opposites in the viable cities of the future.”

– says Ole Schrøder, partner in THIRD NATURE.

Climate challenges force many cities to establish large and very expensive water reservoirs under existing roads and squares. With POP-UP, THIRD NATURE wants to create added value by making use of the expensive reservoirs and establishing underground parking facilities, with urban spaces or public features on top.

The round shape of the parking facility and the water reservoir makes the parking facility lighter and thus helps the buoyancy. The spiral-shaped ramp of the parking facility makes it possible to drive to and from the parking facility on ground level, regardless of the water level in the water reservoir.

“POP-UP is an example of a radical thinking, where design and complex engineering is applied to face challenges imposed by climate change and the need for sustainable urban living,” says Tommy Olsen, Project Director at COWI, one of the engineering firm that has contributed to the project with structural modeling and economic calculations.

Instead of constructing a rainwater reservoir that will be empty 99% of the time, a monofunctional parking facility – often too expensive to build underground where it does not occupy space, and an active urban space fighting for m² in the dense cities, THIRD NATURE suggests POP-UP. A climatic, vibrant and innovative solution that meets all three needs in one solution, which makes it an attractive solution in an overall economic perspective.

“Cities are in extreme situations where billions need to be spent on climate mitigation solutions and the equivalent amount on handling densification of the cities, especially the conflict between cars and urban spaces, so for us it is natural to think of the solutions together,” says Flemming Raft Thomsen, partner at THIRD NATURE.

In September 2015, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the City of Copenhagen’s Technical and Environmental Administration signed a cooperation agreement to develop innovative climate adaptation solutions. THIRD NATURE, together with engineering firms COWI and RAMBØLL, have participated in a number of workshops in New York, with the aim of developing scalable solutions based on experiences from Copenhagen’s climate adaptations.

POP-UP has the inherent potential to be scaled and adapted to other big cities facing similar issues of climate adaptation and parking challenges. The project has been developed and refined for locations in Copenhagen and St. John’s Park in New York (where the illustrations are from).

POP-UP can therefore contribute to the development of a compact metropolitan area based on a decentralized and design-integrated climate adaptation strategy. The co-operation between THIRD NATURE, COWI and RAMBØLL shows how design and climate adaptation can be integrated into a strong business case, with optimized investments that make space for more buildings and attractive urban spaces.

Location:

St. John’s Park, New York City, USA

Project Data:

• Architect: THIRD NATURE
• Engineering Firms: COWI and RAMBØLL

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Our cities are changing rapidly, thanks to the advent of smartphones, driverless cars, data sensors, connected vehicles, and public Wi-Fi. Thanks to technology, commuters and urban dwellers in general have more options that help them navigate cities and tap into real-time data to find parking and public transport connections. These advances in digital technology in urban environments also allow experts to reinvent cities and optimize their infrastructure.

Google’s latest spin-off, Sidewalk Labs, creates new tech products that will address the problems of city life and improve transportation, social services, health and public safety. Owned by Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, this “smart-city” venture is building an integrated platform for urban innovation that spans technology, data, policy best practices, relationships, and capital. Sidewalk Labs has hired a team of experts – engineers, city planners, and entrepreneurs – to create these digital products and amass a wealth of knowledge that will allow them to analyze and optimize how city dwellers live, work, commute and use public services.

The enterprise plans to create companies in partnership with entrepreneurs, and work with successful management teams seeking public-private partnerships to help take full advantage of the biggest urban opportunities. Through the use of ubiquitous connectivity, real-time sensors, precise location services, distributed trust, autonomous systems, and digital actuation and fabrication, Sidewalk Labs hopes to solve urban problems such as high costs of living, congested commutes, public health crises and fossil fuel dependency.

Some of the main areas will be performance-based code, advanced materials, and new ownership models for modern affordable housing, digital mobility system which will manage limited road space to improve transportation equity and air quality, personalized social services and new business models, renewable energy, and smarter storage for distributed energy management.

In 2015, Sidewalk Labs acquired companies Control Group and Titan forming a subsidiary called Intersection, which operates with city governments to design media platforms that create public assets and offer advertising options to clients. Interserction’s most recognizable product to date is LinkNYC, a first-of-its-kind communications network that will replace over 7,500 pay phones across the five boroughs with new structures called Links. Each Link provides fast, free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions.

Thanks to advertising, LinkNYC is completely free. Its innovative digital OOH advertising network is expected to generate more than a half billion dollars in revenue for New York City and provide clients with an optimized, context-aware platform which can reach more people in New York City.

Another flagship platform, Flow, uses aggregated, anonymous traffic data to help city managers identify bottlenecks or redirect trains and buses to neighborhoods with poor transit. It uses technology to stitch together available parking, reducing the time drivers spend circling and the amount of land devoted to parking. This aims to allow cities to better understand where, how, and why people are traveling in order to plan stronger transit networks, and explores the options people have in transportation, the choices they make, and the information that factors into them.

Sidewalk Labs has also been working with 10 cities in the Smart Cities Challenge organized by the US Department of Transportation, which provided $40 million in federal funds to the winning application to modernize their transportation infrastructure through the use of state-of-the-art digital technology. The challenge received seventy-eight applications in total and last June, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that Columbus, Ohio, has been selected as the winner. Sixteen other applications still received some funding and Sidewalk Labs plans to work with these cities to implement and improve Flow, with the possibility for the cities to buy the product.

“We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles of trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform that will give both the public and private parties and government the capacity to actually understand the data in ways they haven’t before,” Daniel L. Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s chief executive, told The New York Times. Doctoroff is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former chief executive of Bloomberg.

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The shift towards “smarter cities” is become a more widespread trend, with new technologies and data gathering being tested across the world in order to optimize urban infrastructure. We are excited to see how these solutions affect our daily life.

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Long before developing the BIG YARD, when Sascha Zander and Christian Roth wanted to start up as architects after university they could not find clients. So they decided to search for a possibility to generate jobs themselves. They saved a piece of land in Berlin via a purchase option and organized several private clients into a building group (German “Baugruppe”) for which they planned and built.

The concept of the “Baugruppe” (building group) has established since then and Zanderroth opened up a firm called SmartHoming which specialized in organizing such projects. The idea of SmartHoming is following: “Ambitious architecture in urban locations with affordable prices. The goal is to affiliate the future owners into a legal structure which acquires the land and assigns the architect.”

Zanderroth Architekten practice a special kind of real estate development. The client gets the opportunity to save the developers margin whereas the architect gets the job and determines the architecture. A variation of job acquisition where the architect does not hold the development risk but has the opportunity to build great buildings as references for himself.

Since then they have finished several award-winning residential buildings with the same concept. One of their earlier co-housing projects in Berlin, titled BIG YARD, was completed in 2010. The building consists of 23 townhouses, which are aligned to create a homogenous volume with 10 summerhouses behind it and 12 penthouses above it. In between, there is a large unplotted garden courtyard with a garage beneath it. The dream of the single house in the midst of Berlin became reality!

A rooftop terrace, summer kitchen, sauna, and four visitors’ apartments add to the aspect of community. The separated, yet overlapping access to the building gives the project an additional village character in terms of its use.

See for yourself:

Location:

BIG YARD: Zelterstrasse 5-11, 10439 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany

Project Data:

• Architects: zanderrotharchitekten gmbh, Berlin
• Team Architects: Kirka Fietzek, Diana Gunkel, Guido Neubeck, Christian Roth, Konrad Scholz, Lutz Tinius, Sascha Zander
• Client: Bauherrengemeinschaft Zelterstraße 5-11
• Load-bearing structure: Ingenieurbüro Andreas Leipold, Berlin
• Building technology: Ingenieurbüro Lüttgens, Berlin
• herrburg Landschaftsarchitekten, Berlin
• Planning / Construction: 2007 – 2010
• Performance stages: 1 – 8
• Residential units: 45
• Storeys: 7
• Costs / Cost group 300 – 400 excl. VAT: EUR 8,970,000
• Gross floor area: 3,336 m2
• Net saleable/rentable area: 6,624 m2
• Site occupancy/Plot ratio: 1,00 / 3,00

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Adding cabins to unused roof tops like CABIN SPACEY or designing houses on misshaped “leftover” lots like Jonathan Tate – when it comes to inventing new genres for urban living, Archipreneurs can be quite creative.

The two architects Beomki Lee and Chang Kyu Lee now take on the air rights of existing buildings in New York City and proposes that affordable housing and public programs can be build there. This projects has just earned them an honorable mention in the New York Affordable Housing Challenge.

In response to the increasing lack of home ownership in New York City – more than 75% of residents rent rather than own – a “Instant City” is proposing new affordable housing design combined with public programs. This proposal does not only provide sufficient living spaces but also foster community-based activities by reconsidering air-right of the city that has been overlooked for a long time. A “Instant City” celebrates multi-dimensional interaction between habitants and city structure while maintaining habitants’ daily activities within the condition of new urban life.

Collecting of Air-Right brings opportunities to maximize capacity to contain affordable housing units within the limited spaces, but also it gives another level of community composition which is flexible and open to existing city plot. This project seeks to utilize abandoned air-right spaces as new possibilities for affordable housing. Since each building categorized by zones has every different restriction in terms of FAR, “Instant City” respects divers contexts of the existing neighborhood in Manhattan.


“Instant City” also offers a new type of public area called “Living Surface”. By differentiating sizes and materials of the platform, the surfaces serve a lot of community-based functions to encourage the interaction between residents and to let people share their culture together. The types of modules for these spots include stairs, playgrounds and gardens.

Location:

225 West 28th Street, New York City, USA

Project Data:

• Designers: Beomki Lee, Chang Kyu Lee
• Program: Affordable Housing in New York City

All images: © Beomki Lee, Chang Kyu Lee

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High-density cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo are seeing an increase in the building of micro-apartments for single and two-person households, especially with the new Millennial generation which favors smaller, more affordable apartments or condominiums over larger houses. Architects and designers are increasingly coming up with space-efficient solutions that include flexible and transformable furniture, automation, and 3D printed objects. Developers in large urban areas are responding to this trend by building micro-apartment buildings that target first-time homebuyers and renters.

This micro-housing trend comes in various iterations from the slight to the extreme – from sleek designs by leading architects for middle income populations in developed countries to the hellish spaces of subdivided apartments in Hong Kong.

In New York, the groundbreaking micro-scale living project is nearing its completion. nArchitects won the 2012 competition organized by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to design micro-dwellings comprising units for one to two-person households. The 35,000-square-foot micro-unit building, formerly known as My Micro NY and later renamed Carmel Place, is located in Manhattan’s Kips Bay area and contains 55 apartments ranging from 250 to 370 square feet in size. The building features steel frames and concrete slabs, with modular units that are prefabricated off-site. Tenants will share spaces such as the building’s roof terrace, community room, lounge and gym. Other amenities include bicycle storage areas, storage rooms and lockers.

According to The New York Times, the monthly rent for most of these apartments will be $950, significantly lower than average for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan, which is around $3,400. Over 60,000 applications for these apartments have already been received from potential tenants.

Co-living is another trend that is being tested in large cities. Following the success of its co-working spaces, WeWork has since expanded into the field of residential architecture. WeLive recently opened in New York, welcoming in its first 80 tenants – a mixture of WeWork’s employees and the company’s members. Combining micro-housing and dorm-like accommodation, WeLive offers small apartments of around 450 square feet for $2,000 a month as well as larger, 1,000-square-foot, four-bedroom units. The development is fully connected via an app that lets tenants use different services in the building.

In London, Pocket Living develops micro-unit buildings with affordable one-bedroom flats called ‘starter homes’ for first-time buyers who earn less than London’s affordable housing limit, currently £66,000. Pocket’s developments are close to Central London and are cheaper than the market rates. Their first development opened in 2008 and was followed by several other buildings in Camden, Hackney, Ealing and Lewisham.

Pocket’s founder, former investment banker Marc Vlessing, noticed the trend of building residential units on infill lots in London. Vlessing made an arrangement with local authority planners and started building high-density developments using modular construction. The company is planning to expand to other parts of the UK within the next five years.

Located in Seoul’s largest district, Songpa Micro-Housing functions as a small urban village that blurs the line between individual living units and semi-public and open-program spaces, adding significant social value to the complex’s reconfigurable blocks. The unit’s blocks, accessible via a single core, are arranged to comply with local zoning requirements, allowing Songpa’s architects to form a tapioca-like outer layer that permeates the main volumes and acts as a soft byway between public and private spaces, interior and exterior.

Two unit sizes of 120 and 240 square feet were designed with extreme flexibility in mind, both internally and in relation to each other. Operable walls, built-in furniture, and transformable elements accentuate the functional flexibility of the spaces while subtler interventions, such as the introduction of clerestory windows and extended sight lines, create an impression of spaciousness.

Micro-apartments are not a new thing. The concept of small living spaces was pioneered by Japanese architects back in the 1970s, starting with Kisho Kurokawa’s iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower  in 1972. Perhaps the most extreme version of micro-living can be found in modern-day Tokyo; one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Over the last decades, landlords have developed sharing houses, known as ‘geki-sema’, which are incredibly small living units that people use solely for sleeping and storing their possessions. These are in effect stacked boxes, are often windowless, and target young professionals looking for a central city location. These units cost £320 to rent per month, and include electricity and heating.

Product manufacturers like IKEA are also getting on-board with the micro-living trend. The Swedish company released a new collection of space-saving, multifunctional furniture as a response to a growing population living in small dwellings. Their ‘On the Move’ collection went on sale in 2014. “We were thinking about the needs of the young urban generations that often forgo space to follow their dreams in the big cities,” Gemma Arranz, Interior Design Manager for Ikea UK and Ireland told Dezeen, “The collection is flexible, affordable, beautiful and can be easily moved within the home to maximize the smallest of spaces.”

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Do you think the micro-housing trend is here to stay? How will it change our cities in the future?

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