Lloyd Alter of Treehugger recently wrote about this infill housing project in Paris. Designed by Mobile Architectural Office (MAO), it is a 6-storey building with 6 residential suites (two of which are 3-storey triplex suites) and 1 ground floor non-residential space.
Building section:
But here’s where things get really remarkable: the area of this corner site is less than 100 m2 (~1,000 sf), the construction budget was €940,000 (excluding VAT), and almost the entire structure was built out of cross-laminated timber. So overall, this is an incredibly sustainable build: it uses land and services efficiently and it uses low-carbon materials.
At this point, you should now be wondering, “why can’t we just do this everywhere?” And this would be the right question.
Lloyd correctly points out in his article that one of the things that makes this building feasible is that it only has one exit stair (as well as no elevator). Typically you need two means of egress, which can serve as a real barrier to smaller builds like this one here.
But in this case, and this is part of the argument, the building is small enough that, should a fire or emergency happen, occupants could be rescued through their windows. So technically there are still two ways of getting out.
In this year’s predictions, I mentioned that we would see “supportive building code changes”, which would help to encourage more infill housing. Exiting is one of the changes I had in mind when I wrote the post. So here’s hoping that policy makers are reading this blog, looking to projects like this one in Paris, and recognizing the benefits.
Talking about exit stairs may not be as exciting and seemingly impactful as something like a foreign buyer ban, but I promise you that removing the many barriers to building this scale of housing would ultimately bring more benefit to our cities.
P.S. This project is also social rental housing.
Image: MAO
It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):
I don't know if any of you have had a chance to play with ChatGPT yet, but it is pretty incredible. Here is something that my friend David Fitzpatrick, who is a planner, tweeted out:
https://twitter.com/_DavidFitz/status/1600886386734682112?s=20&t=nxrqQJM8AQ6unugSs7eP9w
There is really no way of telling that AI produced this. It sounds natural and, in this particular case, it also feels like it understands that this is an ongoing debate: "the by-law may not provide enough flexibility to allow for..."
It's a good thing I don't write for a living.
Lloyd Alter of Treehugger recently wrote about this infill housing project in Paris. Designed by Mobile Architectural Office (MAO), it is a 6-storey building with 6 residential suites (two of which are 3-storey triplex suites) and 1 ground floor non-residential space.
Building section:
But here’s where things get really remarkable: the area of this corner site is less than 100 m2 (~1,000 sf), the construction budget was €940,000 (excluding VAT), and almost the entire structure was built out of cross-laminated timber. So overall, this is an incredibly sustainable build: it uses land and services efficiently and it uses low-carbon materials.
At this point, you should now be wondering, “why can’t we just do this everywhere?” And this would be the right question.
Lloyd correctly points out in his article that one of the things that makes this building feasible is that it only has one exit stair (as well as no elevator). Typically you need two means of egress, which can serve as a real barrier to smaller builds like this one here.
But in this case, and this is part of the argument, the building is small enough that, should a fire or emergency happen, occupants could be rescued through their windows. So technically there are still two ways of getting out.
In this year’s predictions, I mentioned that we would see “supportive building code changes”, which would help to encourage more infill housing. Exiting is one of the changes I had in mind when I wrote the post. So here’s hoping that policy makers are reading this blog, looking to projects like this one in Paris, and recognizing the benefits.
Talking about exit stairs may not be as exciting and seemingly impactful as something like a foreign buyer ban, but I promise you that removing the many barriers to building this scale of housing would ultimately bring more benefit to our cities.
P.S. This project is also social rental housing.
Image: MAO
It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):
I don't know if any of you have had a chance to play with ChatGPT yet, but it is pretty incredible. Here is something that my friend David Fitzpatrick, who is a planner, tweeted out:
https://twitter.com/_DavidFitz/status/1600886386734682112?s=20&t=nxrqQJM8AQ6unugSs7eP9w
There is really no way of telling that AI produced this. It sounds natural and, in this particular case, it also feels like it understands that this is an ongoing debate: "the by-law may not provide enough flexibility to allow for..."
It's a good thing I don't write for a living.
Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):
This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.
For more about that process, here's a short video:
https://youtu.be/b-688Jvjmwk
If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.
Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.
It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.
Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):
This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.
For more about that process, here's a short video:
https://youtu.be/b-688Jvjmwk
If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.
Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.
It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.
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