Public housing is the challenge for designers
Affordable shelter can be quite attractive and very efficient, a city design competition demonstrated.
By Larry Eichel
Inquirer Staff Writer
Imagine a group of houses in North Philadelphia with solar panels to help provide electricity, cisterns to recycle rainwater, and grass growing on the roofs to keep the interior living space cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.
That's one vision of what subsidized affordable housing in Philadelphia can be. And it was laid out last evening as part of the conclusion of a design challenge organized by the Philadelphia Neighborhood Development Collaborative and the Community Design Collaborative.
"This shows that we can do exciting things in affordable housing," said Deborah McColloch, director of the city's Office of Housing and Community Development, who served as a juror reviewing the plans. "It doesn't have to be cinder-block design with the cheapest materials. These can be houses anyone would want to live in."
In the challenge, a local architectural firm, working on a volunteer basis, was paired with a community-development corporation to address a real-world site that the corporation would like to develop.
The design for the environmentally efficient homes - some of which have interior spaces with two-story ceilings - was presented by architect Brian Phillips of Interface Studio, who had worked in collaboration with Asociacion de Puertorriquenos en Marcha.
The site is the 1800 block of North Sheridan Street, near Seventh and Berks. The housing would be for buyers making no more than $55,000 per year, a figure that represents 80 percent of the median family income for this area.
"Who better to serve with energy savings and better efficiency of materials that people who have an affordability problem?" asked Manuel Delgado, deputy director of housing for APM.
Two other teams reported on their work as well.
Architects from the firm of Francis Cauffman Foley Hoffmann, working with the New Kensington CDC, proposed taking six tiny, empty, two-story row houses on the 2000 block of Hazard Street in Kensington and putting third floors on them, making them viable three-bedroom homes.
And Becker Winston Architects, in cooperation with Project H.O.M.E., presented an ambitious plan for rebuilding several residential blocks in North Philadelphia, side streets in the area of 24th and Berks.
The goal in that case was to reduce density and give an increased sense of security. Designers did so by cutting the number of units in half; proposing twin homes instead of row houses; giving each twin a side yard; and building the structures so that they ran the width of the narrow block.
In addition, they faced every other house in the opposite direction, so that neither of the streets would feel like a dangerous rear alley.
"What we've seen with all of these proposals is that the design of infill housing in Philadelphia needs to be approached in a more serious way, and it can be," said architect Lisa Armstrong.
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