Here is another great video from About Here talking about how breaking certain rules could make for better apartment buildings.
The basis for the video is a design competition put on by Urbanarium, called Decoding Density, which asked participants to propose creative solutions for “six-story plus apartment forms in Metro Vancouver.”
More specifically, the competition asked: How might Vancouver intensify its single-family neighborhoods with small-scale wood-frame apartments?
The About Here video covers some of the common themes from the submissions and, not surprisingly, the first is single-stair buildings. Requiring only a single point of egress can really unlock small sites.
Some of the other ideas are, perhaps, a bit more adventurous; but these are valuable exercises. Many rules are dumb. So it’s important that we continually question them and search for better ways.