Fred Wilson (venture capitalist) and Joanne Wilson (also an investor) have been working on a passive house apartment building in Brooklyn for the last five years. Their development company is called Frame Home. And this past week they received a pretty great Christmas gift in the form of a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy from NYC Buildings.

At 5 storeys and with only 10 two-bedroom units, you could classify this building as the kind "missing middle" housing that gets so much air time here in Toronto. And so not only have they managed to build relatively small, but they've done it using passive house design principles.

Here are some of the apartment building's features:

• Cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure

• Passive house design approach

• Triple-pane windows

• Interior polished and insulated concrete walls (presumably to act as a thermal mass to moderate heating/cooling throughout the year)

• Solar panels installed on the upper facade and roof (passive house design should, in theory, allow these to supply a big chunk of the building's energy needs)

• No fossil fuels used throughout the building -- everything is electrical

• Fully sub-metered units

• Outdoor circulation spaces/stairs, providing access to a shared rooftop courtyard (I'm assuming these also serve as required egress for the building)

• Dedicated elevator entrance for every suite (i.e. no interior circulation/corridor spaces)

• Composting facilities within the building

• Bike room connected to the ground-floor lobby

There's also a co-working and community space planned for the ground floor called "Framework." Interestingly enough, they have already responded to the current pandemic. Instead of open-air desks, you rent fully enclosed 8' x 8' pods that are sound-proofed and come with their own HVAC systems.

Congratulations Fred and Joanne on such an exciting and pioneering project. (I would love to see the development pro forma!) If you'd like to learn more about Frame 283, here is their website and here is a profile that the New York Times did on the project back in January. Building with CLT is apparently prohibited in NYC. Frame 283 got an exemption.

Coworking spaces are big business.

One of the biggest of those companies is WeWork. As of last month (November 2015), the company had raised close to a billion dollars from investors like JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Management, and Benchmark Capital, and was valued at $10 billion. (Remember though, this is in the private not public markets.)

If you’re unfamiliar with coworking spaces, check out this post from The Spaces. It’s a great demonstration of how beautiful these spaces can be.

All of this is interesting because it speaks to the changing nature of work. There are a lot of people freelancing, participating in the “online gig economy” and working on new ideas. And in many of these cases, they don’t want or need traditional office space and/or they want the community that many of these coworking spaces afford – both offline and online.

But it’s not just the office that is changing. It’s also potentially living spaces. Since 2014, WeWork has been talking about their new coliving concept, WeLive. The idea here is to combine smaller living spaces with larger common areas and create an overall live-work community. And they are not the only ones thinking about this.

Below is a building section of what this might look. It’s from a Vornado Realty presentation. They are working with WeWork to deliver their new WeLive concept in Crystal City, Virginia.

It’s so interesting to see this concept come to fruition. Back in 2008 when I was in architecture school, I worked with a classmate of mine and designed a modular coliving apartment building. It was called the Philly Flex Dwelling and it worked like this:

The idea here was to start with standard floor plates and use a structural exoskeleton to minimize interior columns. This way you could insert whatever prefabricated modules you wanted and also re-purpose the structure should you want to change the building’s use in the future. 

This is not that dissimilar from what was originally proposed for One Bloor West here in Toronto. Though the goal there was column-free retail spaces. 

The yellow spaces are the shared common areas and the remaining spaces are the residential living “pods.” We also designed a “solar skin” that was perfectly tuned to the building’s orientation and location in Philadelphia. The idea here was to maximize winter sun (for heating) and minimize summer sun (to keep the building cool).

That was a fun project to work on.