2021 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: COMMUNITIES

To create an equitable, sustainable and healthier community, what role does the collaboration among academia, government and practice could play? Such notion of engaged scholarship is inquired in the latest collaborative project of our research lab on Design for Health: Advancing Built Environment Performance through Equitable, Ecological and Sustainable Developments. In partnership with The City of Sandy Springs, a team of undergraduate architecture students mapped the health equity within a built environment setting, proposing environmental responses to challenges common to disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The City of Sandy Springs, GA is home to more than 110,000 residents, with roughly the same number of workers commuting daily. While the local population is on average relatively wealthy, there is increasing pressure on housing affordability. The area of study illustrates a dual reality. Many older multifamily apartments are located along major transportation corridors and house a greater socio-economic diversity than that found in the single-family home subdivisions. These outdated developments are often the only option vulnerable renters can afford (HNA)(1). Since 2013, over 1,000 apartment units were demolished; many others were upgraded and increased rental rates, displacing residents and increasing the cost burden of those who stayed in Sandy Springs. The selected neighborhood, The Crossroads, encompasses a mix of uses with garden-style apartments built for the most part in the 1960s. The community is characterized by a concentration of LatinX families with modest to low incomes whose population has increased over years. The Crossroads area was the subject of an urban design exercise in the Roswell Road Small Area Plan, an appendix to the Next Ten Comprehensive Plan, that envisioned a complete redevelopment of the area, generating substantial changes and challenges for the low-income community. The students, instead, consider the existing assets to develop proposals responding to community needs and wellbeing including challenges associated with the interdependent impacts of air and noise pollution, transportation, flood risk and ageing housing stock. The team has conducted a literature review and research on health and equity indicators, applying their findings to analyze existing conditions. They examine the interrelation between individual/community health, and equity through the lens of socioeconomic status, ecological and physical environment. In collaboration with The City staff, the research team seeks means to create healthier, more equitable and ecologically balanced built environments by providing design solutions to improve the quality of life at a low cost to landlords, to stabilize rental rates.

Despite the complex matrix of authorities, policies, and funding, the research community mapping could assist decision-makers with a deeper understanding of the neighborhood. The findings can likely be adapted to other areas of Sandy Springs and the region, and the solutions provided by the students could benefit thousands of residents’ living conditions. Thus, the study underlines the impact of decoding an academic project into a collaborative mainstream platform — shared by the government, practitioners, policymakers, and community — to translate design research into action for an equitable and resilient community.

This design research project explores New Orleans East’s history as a sacrificial landscape and proposes the creation of more Equitable Communities through landscape planning that incorporates environmental data and community self-determination.

The exclusion of voices of racial minorities from environmental decision making has been one of the causal factors in the declining health of New Orleans East’s disproportionately racialized residents. My site of focus is the neighbourhood Versailles, which is home to the densest Vietnamese diaspora population in America. The design proposal outlines an operational framework for a community-based organization, The Versailles Landscape Planning Organization (VLPO), that allows the residents of Versailles to determine the environmental uses of community land, to monitor the health of these lands, and to bring this data to that table with regional authorities so that their voices can be directly heard in environmental decision making in the future.

There are 300,000 m2 of vacant lots owned by the Catholic Church, the City of New Orleans, and privately throughout the neighbourhood of Versailles; they will become the sites where a network of air quality, groundwater, and stream water monitors are embedded by the VPLO. The monitors are a way to strengthen the already present environmental knowledge in the neighbourhood. This data can be used to plan their community more resiliently and as a tool to hold extractive industries accountable for the real effects of their practices. Streamwter monitors provide data on water temperature and flood risk, which is important for the residents planning water distribution in their farms and reservoirs. Groundwater monitors record data on the water table, important to know when planning future land-use. It also provides data on groundwater pollutants such as arsenic and diesel-organics. Air quality monitors sense the concentration and types of particulates in the air, which can have negative effects on respiratory health of those affected.

The VPLO will catalogue data collected from monitors, as well as elevation and lot size to create an environmental assessment of the vacant lots in the neighbourhood. Then, with this knowledge, the residents of Versailles can collectively choose the kind of productive landscape programming that will be implemented on site. Individual lots can be converted over short, medium, and long terms, with each productive landscape contributing to the food security, economic enrichment, and/or environmental health of the neighbourhood.

Short term strategies (Aquaponic Agriculture and Community Market Spaces) are extensions of the food and economic security initiatives of existing community organizations like VEGGI Farmers Co-op and the Vietnamese American Youth Leadership Alliance.  Medium term strategies ( Solar Farms and Biomass Energy Generation) will establish district energy and stormwater management systems with the funding of the Louisiana Regional Planning Authority, and the NOLA City Council, reducing dependency on the extractive oil and gas infrastructure adjacent to the neighbourhood, replacing them with renewable forms of energy. Long term strategies (Biochar Soil Remediation and Arsenic Precipitation) will establish remediation of groundwater and soil strategies funded by petrochemical and industrial polluters with the consultation of the community.

Airriess, Christopher A. and Clawson, David L. “Vietnamese Market Gardens in New Orleans.” Geographical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 16-31.

Bankston, Carl L. III. “Versailles Village: the History and Structure of a Vietnamese Community in New Orleans.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology, Volume 26 No. I, May 1998.

Botic, Christiana . “Meet The Refugees Fighting for the Future of New Orleans.” National Geographic, 2018. https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/.

Bullard, Robert D.; Mohai, Paul; Saha, Robin; and Wright, Beverley. “Toxic Wastes and Race, 1987-2007.” United Church of Christ, 2007.

Chiang, S. Leo.  “A Village Called Versailles.” PBS Independent Lens Selection, 2009.

Newell, Peter. “Race, Class and the global Politics of Environmental Inequality.” Global Environmental Politics, vol. 5 no. 3, 2005, p. 70-94. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/186524.

Simms, Patrice Lumumba.  “On Diversity and Public Policy Making: An Environmental Justice Perspective.” Sustainable Development Law & Policy, 13, no. 1 (2012): 14-19, 57-59.

Sze, Julie. “Toxic Soup Redux: Why Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Matter after Katrina.” Social Science Research Council, 2006. https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/toxic-soup-redux-why-environmental-racism-and-environmental-justice-matter-after-katrina/.

Tang, Eric. “A Gulf Unites Us: The Vietnamese Americans of Black New Orleans East.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, pp. 117–49, doi:10.1353/aq.2011.0005.

Weaver, Matthew P. “Fear and Loathing in Post-Katrina Emergency Debris Management: According to Whom, Pursuant to What, and You Want To Dump That Where?” Tulane Environmental Law Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2007, pp. 429–446. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43292844. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.

Over the last hundred years, human populations have increasingly become urbanized. Currently, it is estimated that 55% of the world’s population lives in cities (DESA 2018) and by 2050 models estimate this number could balloon to 70% as climate change makes farmland unusable and drives mass migration into cities from rural areas. Researchers have identified several megacities (i.e., cities with a population of over 10 million) around the world that will see dramatic increases in population due to climate-change driven migration – straining the infrastructural capacities of these cities and creating dense living conditions that may be unhealthy and dehumanizing. Providing sustainable design solutions for these scenarios that balances multiple quantitative and qualitative stakeholder needs is a pressing problem for the architectural discipline. Developing pedagogical models that can equip architectural students to meet this challenge is, therefore, crucial. How can educators teach students to manage the complexity of mega-dense scenarios and other wicked problems through project-based educational models?

The emergence of artificial intelligence technologies in the last several decades has opened the door to the creation of entirely new ways of defining and searching a space of possible design solutions based on quantifiable criteria (e.g., energy use; daylight exposure, cost, etc.) with unparalleled speed – allowing millions of solutions to be explored in the same time it would take a human designer to explore dozens of design alternatives. Numerous automated strategies have been developed by researchers (Von Buelow, 2012; Mueller and Ochsendorf, 2011; Turrin et al., 2011) to efficiently explore design spaces, but researchers have found that augmented intelligence-based processes (Bechikh, Elarbi, and Said 2017) – in which a human and a search algorithm work together – provide the greatest capabilities to search a design space and find solutions to problems involving many objectives. In these workflows, the dynamic and non-linear styles of human thinking are layered with varying levels of artificial intelligence to create a hybrid style of thinking that can solve problems neither the human nor the algorithm could solve individually. These augmented workflows have demonstrated efficacy in managing complexity but their application in architectural education to address the complexity of mega-dense design scenarios and other wicked problems is still largely unexplored. Further, previous work in this area has been limited in its ability to integrate qualitative criteria (e.g., aesthetic, experiential criteria, etc.) into the design search process.

In order to address this gap, this research investigates pedagogical models that integrate augmented-intelligence-driven workflows into project-based educational contexts. These pedagogical models are investigated for their capacity to foster integrative and metacognitive knowledge (i.e., knowledge about how knowledge is created, strategic thinking) (Bloom, College, and Examiners 1964, Krathwohl 2002).  Educational case studies are presented that introduce key concepts and tools in relation to augmented workflows. Educational outcomes are then evaluated, and best practices are discussed – providing a roadmap for the discipline on the value of augmented intelligence-based processes in architectural education.

Bechikh, Slim, Maha Elarbi, and Lamjed Ben Said. 2017. “Many-objective Optimization Using Evolutionary Algorithms: A Survey.” In Recent Advances in Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization, 105-137. Springer.

Bloom, Benjamin Samuel, Committee of College, and University Examiners. 1964. Taxonomy of educational objectives. Vol. 2: Longmans, Green New York.

DESA U. (2018) Revision of world urbanization prospects. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs16.

Krathwohl, David R. 2002. “A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview.”  Theory into practice 41 (4):212-218.

Mueller C and Ochsendorf J. (2011) An Interactive Evolutionary Framework for Structural Design. 7th International Seminar of the the Structural Morphology Group (SMG), IASSWorkingGroup15. 1-6.

Turrin M, von Buelow P and Stouffs R. (2011) Design explorations of performance driven geometry in architectural design using parametric modeling and genetic algorithms. Advanced Engineering Informatics 25: 656-675.

Von Buelow P. (2012) ParaGen: Performative Exploration of generative systems. Journal of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures 53: 271-284.

Architectural design research on local materials and vernacular building is increasingly moving toward an integrated model of design-build optimizing processes of digital modeling and fabrication. Conversely, this paper details a low-tech—though high-performance—alternative: exploring the construction of architectural structures using mass-produced, recycled paper products to offer a promising avenue toward grassroots sustainability as it intersects with circular economy and sustainable craft. Informed by architectural histories of environmentalism, the paper presents design research, architectural applications, and construction logistics in the form of documentation and discussion of two recently fabricated domestic prototypes—and one speculative housing proposal—utilizing recycled papier-mâché and eco-adhesive tested at sites in the extreme climate of the American Southwest.¹

The paper specifically demonstrates the unique application of Builder’s Paper—a ubiquitous and widely accessible industrially produced product made from recycled fibers—as a structural and aesthetic alternative to concrete, stucco, and other materials. Paper outperforms its rivals in sustainability, construction efficiency, and availability. It is lightweight, completely non-toxic, tensile, and available for purchase worldwide. Most notably, paper is both recycled and recyclable—making its use in our research circular by generating a secondary or tertiary lifecycle of an already low-carbon product. Furthermore, as demonstrated by the projects presented in our research, paper rivals its alternatives in its structural capacities and versatility as a facade application.

This paper demonstrates the versatility, sustainability and accessibility of paper in three projects. It first documents the application of paper strips soaked in non-toxic adhesive as casting material for convexo-concave thin-shell structures—demonstrating the structural capacity of paper as a primary construction material using an inventive process that reduces material waste by half and limits the need for industrial equipment. Next, it examines the usefulness of paper pulp as a facade application on par in performance with stucco or plaster—yet offering a more renewable alternative. Lastly, this paper imagines speculative futures in which these technologies can become implemented at large scales to create resilient, Zero-Carbon Communities as safer and healthier alternatives for the environment and users.²

1. Luke, T. (2010). Ephemeralization as Environmentalism: Rereading R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Organization & Environment, pp. 354 – 362.

2. Boulding, K. (1966). The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Resources for the Future, pp. 1 – 14.

Overwhelming scientific data confirms that the primary cause of global warming is anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2014).  The resulting extreme weather events (sea level rise and extended wildfire season amongst others) contrast with the discrediting of climate science at the national level beginning as early as the late 1980s (McCright & Dunlap, 2011).  This discrediting has led to a lack of national sustainability policy and has compelled the State of California to take a leadership role in addressing the issue.  California’s legislative policies and Gubernatorial executive orders include the reduction of GHG and electricity consumption by targeted dates (Air Resources Board, 2006, Office of the Governor, 2020).  State Agencies, including California’s Community College system, have financial incentives to meet these goals.

The core mission of Universities and Colleges is to educate society.  Colleges impact society over the long term by exposing students to new ideas and shifting paradigms (Dyer & Dyer, 2017).  As the most accessible of higher education institutions in California, the community college system includes 116 colleges educating 2.1 million students annually (California Community College Chancellor’s Office, 2021).  The ability to expose students to sustainability principles is greater than at the University of California and California State University systems, educating 765,550 students combined (California State University, 2020, University of California, 2021).  Moreover, individual Community Colleges are rising to the challenge by creating sustainability committees, writing sustainability plans, and hiring staff to implement those plans.  Demonstrating leadership, the Community College Board of Governors adopted an energy and sustainability policy (CCCCO Board of Governors, n.d.).

This qualitative study (n=8) is a gap analysis of a Northern California Community College’s sustainability plan.  A gap analysis frames the problem of practice by seeking input from those closest to the issue by analyzing their knowledge, motivation, and organizational support for the initiative (Clark & Estes, 2008).  The focus of this study is the College’s Sustainability Committee, a group of 14 members representing Students, Faculty, Classified Staff, Managers, and Academic Administrators.  The college’s energy reduction plan includes installing high efficiency lighting, solar panels, geothermal systems, energy monitoring, and the incorporation of environmental classes into the curriculum.

The findings demonstrate that committee members were knowledgeable about the “triple bottom line” of sustainability, including the ecological, economic, and equity impacts of policy (Rieckmann, 2012).  These principles mirror the Kaiser Foundation’s “social determinants of health” (Kaiser Foundation, 2010).  However, committee members struggled to include measurable, achievable, and time-bound goals.  Remedies include a facilitated goal-setting workshop.  Committee members were found to be highly motivated and engaged, seeking to change the culture of the institution.  Noticeable organizational support began when “sustainability” was included in the College’s strategic plan.  Finally, faculty were stymied by systemic structures preventing the integration of sustainability classes into the general curriculum.  Despite these challenges, the College was acknowledged by the Community College Facility Coalition (CCFC, 2018) for their work.

This paper provides inspiration and lessons-learned for other community colleges and institutions of higher education.

Air Resources Board. (2006). Assembly Bill 32 overview. Retrieved from https://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/ab32/ab32.htm

California Community College Chancellor’s Office. (2018). California Community Colleges key facts. Retrieved from http://californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/PolicyInAction/KeyFacts.aspx

California State University.  (2020).  California State University Enrollment Reaches All-Time High.  Retrieved from https://www2.calstate.edu/csu-system/news/Pages/California-State-University-Enrollment-Reaches-All-Time-High.aspx

CCCCO Board of Governors.  (n.d.)  Energy and Sustainability Policy.  Retrieved from  https://www.cccco.edu/-/media/CCCCO-Website/About-Us/Divisions/College-Finance-and-Facilities-Planning/Programs/Sustainability/x_BOG_Energy_Sustainability_Policy_FINAL.pdf?la=en&hash=B06235FB2D7ACE097D4CDB1AA1C8080E15AFF1C7

CCFC. (2018).  CCFC Workshop Presentation.  Retrieved from  https://www.caccfc.org/documents/18-FacilityMasterPlanning.pdf

Clark, R. E., & Estes, F. (2008). Turning research into results. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

Dyer, G., & Dyer, M. (2017). Strategic leadership for sustainability by higher education: The American college & university presidents’ climate commitment. Journal of Cleaner Production 140 part 1, 111-116.

IPCC. (2014). Climate change 2014: Synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva, Switzerland: Author.

Kaiser Family Foundation.  (2018).  Beyond Health Care:  The Role of Social Determinants in Promoting health and Health Equity.  Retrieved from  https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/beyond-health-care-the-role-of-social-determinants-in-promoting-health-and-health-equity/

McCright, A. M., Dunlap, R. E. (2011). Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change 21, 1163-1172.

Office of the Governor.  (2020).  Governor Newsom Announces California will Phase Out Gasoline-Powered Cars & Drastically Reduce Demand for Fossil Fuel in California’s Fight Against Climate Change.  Retrieved from  https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/09/23/governor-newsom-announces-california-will-phase-out-gasoline-powered-cars-drastically-reduce-demand-for-fossil-fuel-in-californias-fight-against-climate-change/

Rieckmann, M., (2012). Future-oriented higher education: Which key competencies should be fostered through university teaching and learning? Futures 44, 127-135

University of California.  (n.d.)  The only world-class public research university for, by and of California.  Retrieved from  https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-system

It’s a cliché hardly worth noting. Big box stores swoop into new territory, push out smaller mom-and-pop stores, creating a homogenous, ubiquitous condition that erases local culture and disrupts economies. While sharing some of these same familiar dynamics, however, the “small box” poses a unique threat to the vibrancy of local communities.

Dollar General (DG) is a key example of the small box; this prominent discount retailer is rapidly expanding with over 16,000 locations and $27 billion in annual sales. Averaging 8,000 square feet, DG is significantly smaller than a standard big box store. Despite its small scale, the small box poses a threat to local communities through offering fewer jobs, supporting poor nutrition, and targeting low-income shoppers with the appearance of a discount. While DG mimics small, community-based stores, even evoking nostalgia for bygone days of general stores, it is a local instantiation of a much broader network. Although this phenomenon of “mass intimacy” purportedly offers significant benefits for consumers, there is growing evidence that these stores significantly contribute to economic distress, often disproportionately affecting low-income Black communities.

This proposal synthesizes work from an undergraduate studio with faculty research through investigating a specific Dollar General location in a dying retail center. Built in 1978, Cimarron Plaza was a strategic development intended to keep shoppers from leaving Stillwater for larger metro centers like Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Despite supporting the local community for a couple decades, many of its retail spaces are now empty. Cimarron Plaza no longer meets the criteria for Class C properties as it is over 20 years old, lacks a desirable location, and requires significant maintenance. Yet, DG successfully continues to thrive in its location there.

Through analysis and speculative design, this work investigates the implications of the small box for architecture and discourse on the city, using Fumihiko Maki’s concepts of collective form as a framework for understanding the morphological and programmatic changes DG imposes on the towns it inhabits. In this context, Cimarron Plaza inverted the form of Main Street, turning an ecology of small businesses into a series of façades enclosing a centralized parking lot. Within advanced stages of capitalism, this ecology is eroded further and inverted into a condensed form: the small box. These small boxes are not reliant on the vibrancy of their surroundings but rather are sustained by a vast, distributed infrastructure employing economies of scale to thrive where a traditional general store could never survive.

The work identifies threats to community localism by considering the role architecture plays within different scales: global to hyperlocal. At stake is a critique of the dominant model by which the discipline of architecture typically responds; the threat to local communities posed by the small box cannot be adequately met by designing a “better” or more aesthetically pleasing box. Through understanding this condition in its complexity, we can see the limits of architecture’s agency and consider other, new models to intervene within the infrastructure of the small box.

• Hayward, Martin. “any colour you like as long as it’s any colour you like.” dunnhumby, 2009.
• Healy, Jack. “Farm Country Feeds America. But Just Try Buying Groceries There.” The New York Times, November 5, 2019. https://nytimes.com/.
• Maki, Fumihiko. Investigations In Collective Form, Washington University in St. Louis, 1964.
• Mitchell, Stacy, and Marie Donahue. “Report: Dollar Stores Are Targeting Struggling Urban Neighborhoods and Small Towns. One Community Is Showing How to Fight Back.” Institute for Local Self-Reliance, December 6, 2018. https://ilsr.org/.

This paper documents and examines the power of an informal, spontaneous, low-tech spatial gesture: a ladder built to straddle a fence between two properties. The ladder was built in order to give the children in the neighboring backyards a way to traverse the boundary easily, without the need for permission and without the risk of climbing and falling or cutting themselves. The ladder is not elegant. It was made using spare 2x4s. It’s clumsy looking. It leans. But the power of the ladder is not in how it’s designed or its materiality. The ladder extends the agency of the property owners on both sides of the fence, but especially the children, expanding their territory and opportunities for play. It connects two families and encourages sharing caregiving responsibilities. It is an example of what Margaret Crawford would call “everyday urbanism” or what Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett would call the “urban vernacular:”

“The vernacular is what ordinary people do in their everyday lives. It consists of local practices that take shape outside planning, design, zoning, regulation, and covenants, if not in spite of them. The relationship between the built environment and the social practices that occur within it reveal both intentional and unintentional effects of great importance.” (Kirschenblatt-Gimbett, 19).

The fence divides. The ladder connects. But the spatial situation is complex because these two opposing forces sit together; while the fence is needed to provide an enclosure for the two small dogs belonging to the one family, the ladder sits as an invitation for the parties on both sides to cross-over casually at all times. It is a particularly subversive example of “everyday urbanism” because it turns the fence into its opposite –a bridge. In “Fences and Between Fences: Cultural, Historical, and Smithsonian Perspectives” (Davis and Williams, 2008), the authors unpack Robert Frost’s declaration, that “good fences make good neighbors.” This particular case brings new meaning to the idea of a “good fence.” Is a “good fence” one that actually complicates property boundaries and increases social interaction and interdependence? Can deliberate modifications to fences strengthen localized communities?

This paper uses drawing to illustrate how the ladder expands the landscape of play for the children on both sides of the fence. The paper describes how the ladder became a spot where baked goods are exchanged between families, and clean cookware is left once the baked goods are eaten. It became a short-cut for the one family to access the beach, through the property of the other. It became the spot to leave the kids’ clothing after it’s laundered by the other parents. It was where flowers were left for Mother’s Day and take-out pizza was deposited when the one family tested positive for COVID-19 and the other family did not.

The ladder straddling the fence is a modest, DIY intervention with a big spatial and social impact for the two-family community that it connects. It is a contradictory spatial condition that sits outside of convention and complicates our understanding of property ownership and community-making.

Davis, Robbie and Ed Williams, “Fences and between Fences, Historical, and Smithsonian Perspectives” in Journal of the Southwest, Autumn, 2008, Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 243-261.

Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “Performing the City: Reflections on the Urban Vernacular” in Everyday Urbanism, edited by John Leighton Chase, Margaret Crawford and John Kalinski. 2008: The Monacelli Press, New York, NY, pp. 19-20.

The recent design-build project by the School of Architecture expands upon a successful pedagogical model that embraces community outreach, design experimentation, and climate advocacy. The project is a prototype tiny-home micro-community in a city taking conscious, progressive approaches to rethinking housing, its engagement with not-for-profit development, students, and other local partners. It demonstrates an intersection of education, research, and practice, expanding on the established design-build model through collaborative community building, continuously evolving partnerships, and attention to building performance. This paper describes the project in all these aspects, critically exploring the potential of small-scale housing development as an effective solution within the context of the DFW metropolitan area.

Dubbed Oak Crest Meadow in Kennedale, Texas, the project is an alternate-density micro-community of tiny-homes built on a 1/3-acre lot in a transitioning neighborhood with historically mixed zoning and uncoordinated land use. The design matches the experimental and progressive attitude of the city, where previously, tiny-house communities had not been allowed. The encouragement to be creative within this typology has created a walkable garden community with six 540-sf leasable senior-living homes, a pavilion and central promenade. Project partners include the school, the city, a local not-for-profit, and a host of vendors, contractors, and suppliers.

The project provides a viable housing and community solution for seniors, an underserved demographic disproportionately affected by rapidly increasing housing costs and limited availability. Units are arranged within specifically programmed external common spaces that foster interaction. The micro-community is a catalyst project offering both an urban and architectural model for the neighborhood and city. The student-led team engaged complex challenges, including budgeting, design pre-fabrication, and working alongside a high-school Youth Build program teaching building trades to at-risk students.

This school has inaugurated a new design-build and community engagement facility which underscores its mission and curricular goals, reinforcing a pedagogy of learning-by-making alongside establishing local and community relationships. The project has allowed the design-build program to intensify its core teaching of both community service and building science. Following a year of lockdown and online-only design studios, the Kennedale project is being prefabricated by students learning about prototyping, modular construction, mock-up testing, and improved quality control. The first tiny-house has been fully framed off-site and is now ready for flat-packing and final installation.

Finally, a focus on building performance and residential assemblies underpins the critical role of research and teaching climate and energy stewardship. The ability to construct six nearly identical units had provided a unique opportunity for comparative analysis. By slightly varying unit assemblies and equipment, a performance analysis of energy and water usage, carbon footprint, IAQ and more can be made. The metrics viewed across the entire project will create useful research for the local housing industry and influence future design-build work.

As an ongoing project, the local micro-community offers potentials to further develop both social and architectural prototypes. Future implementation of this typology also signals a new level of cooperation and partnership that suggests real alternatives in an otherwise limiting and prohibitive housing market.

Carpenter, William J., AIA. Learning by Building: Design and Construction in Architectural Education. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997.

Kieran, Stephen and James Timberlake. Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies are Poised to Transform Building Construction. McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Kraus, Chad, ed. Designbuild Education. Routledge, 2017.

Schneiderman, Deborah. Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior. Princeton Architectural Press, 2012.

Welch, Marshall and Star Plaxton-Moore. The Craft of Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning. Campus Compact, 2019.