Comprehensive Design 302 - Spring 2024,
with Moe Htut
The project started as a co-housing space designed for multi-generational families, then expanded to think about how that building sits in and gives back to the city around it. The design is built on a pixelated modular grid where each floor has a different pattern of subtractions. Those cutouts become communal gardens, terraces, and light wells, not leftover space between units but the thing the whole section is organized around.
A prototype pocket sliding door runs through the units, allowing residents to shift between communal interaction and individual privacy depending on the time of day. Glulam beams span the modular courtyards and bridges connect the volumes, so the mid-air gardens are actually usable at every level. The ground floor includes a restaurant and apartment lobby anchored by a shared courtyard, with a private rear courtyard accessible to residents separately. The structural logic and the social logic end up being the same move throughout.
The rooftop is where the urban argument becomes most visible. In a city where green space is scarce and rooftops are mostly dead surface, the design turns the top of the building into a living ecosystem, shared gardens for residents alongside habitat for birds and insects. It functions as a sanctuary above the density of the street, a place to slow down that the neighborhood around it doesn't otherwise have.
FLOORPLANS
SECTIONS + ELEVATIONS
RENDERS
Wall Section
Flex room prototype
Massing Diagram
PHYSICAL MODELS
Study Model
