Category: ARCH 793AB: ADAPTIVE P/RE-USE

Urban Collective ⁴ seeks to claim, design, manage, and expand affordable housing within a framework of four intertwined collective domains: First, the collective committee acts as a democratic decision-making body that includes inhabitants and public representatives. Second, implementing a model of collective ownership and funding between the local government and individuals enables extraction of housing projects from the speculative market in perpetuity. Third, establishing collective design processes fosters adequate translations of inhabitants’ housing needs and facilitates continual reaction to changing circumstances. And fourth, considering collective spaces as an intrinsic part of both interior and exterior living environments ensures a persistent platform for exchange between the public and private, as well as individual and common activites. Offering a stark contrast to a current development scheme of an abandoned parking structure in Koreatown, this project offers an alternative proposal of how the Urban Collective ⁴ framework could reuse the parking structure and its site by creating a democratically operated, experimental, open-ended and community oriented urban intervention for affordable housing, as well as commercial and public activities.

Open-source housing proposes a transformative model for affordable and sustainable housing delivery. Inspired by existing models of open-source design and production – such as WikiHouse – Open-Source Housing goes beyond offering an open, decentralized process: it aims at integrating its open-source production tool kit into an incremental, decommodified, and radically circular housing delivery scheme. Using the Communitly Land Trust (CLT) and Limited Equity Co-operative (LEC) models, Open-Source Housing not only establishes a CLT to extract land from speculation and lease it back to its trust members at an affordable price. It also establishes an LEC that integrates all produced and used materials into a leasing system, where the building materials are considered part of a revolving pool of resources that will return to the LEC after disassembly to be reused or recycled. With this approach, Open-Source Housing will literally open up possibilities for a diversity of owners, dwellers and inhabitants to participate in the production of a multitude of ecological and affordable housing solutions applied at different scales and adapted to various contexts.

Modern society chases endless growth despite our planet’s finite resources. Degrowth is a concept that radically reimagines society, addressing climate change, capitalism, and human rights through a community-based sustainable lifestyle. This project uses architecture to explore degrowth through Urbsteading, transforming vacant existing structures into degrowth micro-communities in urban contexts. Urbsteading becomes a machine for degrowth by combining a Community Land Trust (CLT) model with small unit and co-living typologies for de-commodifying our land ownership model. It supports de-materialization of the built environment through spatial and material re-use and adaptation. Additionally, each Urbstead contains the seeds to self-propagate through a temporary bank of materials that supports future Urbsteads

Commoning Metabolism combines a contemporary interpretation of the metabolist approach with a restructuring of existing forms of property to increase housing affordability and accessibility by defining infrastructure and spatial resources created by these metabolist structures as a commons. In doing so, the project proposes to build open, flexible, expandable, and down sizable structures, financed through public infrastructural funds, and to be occupied with a variety of non-speculative, affordable, prefabricated housing schemes. Using rights will be negotiated between the public authorities, neighborhood communities and non-profit housing developers to ensure enforcement of the commons’ rules, shared management, adequate use, density, and affordability, as well as a circular use of resources and energy. Applied in Koreatown, Commoning Metabolism integrates underutilized parking lots into its commons framework. Since the open structure has a small footprint, the public hand does not have to buy property, but will only exert punctual administrative power to lease the occupied parking lots on a long-term basis. This allows for a direct and effective integration into the existing fabric of Koreatown and will establish the metabolist commons as a responsive and growing network, that contributes to a more inclusive, sustainable, and flexible housing system.

Leveraging Sustainability envisions a tax incentive framework for renovating, expanding and adapting existing buildings in a more environmentally and socially responsible manner. The incentives are addressing three major aspects when it comes the sustainable use of resources, namely reducing consumption of energy, materials, and space. Fostering designs, layouts, technologies, and building elements that can achieve these aims, the incentive framework gives housing developers and owners the possibility to save taxes when they include renewable energy, use recycled, re-used or carbon neutral materials, as well as adequately reduce area consumption per person while simultaneously providing more collective spaces. On the other side of the spectrum, additional taxes will be collected if developers do not subscribe to reducing resource consumption. The project Leveraging Sustainability shows how a recently renovated residential building in Koreatown could have been remodelled when applying design principles that allow to collect all of the introduced tax incentives.

This project explores an alternative take on what the business world refers to as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Addressing CSR from the perspective of adequate and affordable housing for the working class, it transforms the CSR label for its own agenda: Co-operative Stewardship Residences for the workforce, CSR [4W]. The CSR [4W] model envisions a framework where companies provide funds and/or financial backing for creating long-term affordable, worker-led co-operative housing. All inhabitants and the involved company become equitable ‘one share one vote’ members of the co-operative, ensuring that the workers are empowered to participate in the housing’s creation and management. While the CSR [4W] statutes will render housing projects unsaleable, they will enable companies to leverage them as active assets for other financial undertakings. Based on this model, the here proposed CSR [4W] project in Koreatown provides a series of elements for the neighborhood: affordable workforce housing, public space, and production venues for the emerging industry of retrofitting cars into electric vehicles. Despite its large scale, the project’s spatial organization provides flexible housing setups and communal spaces on multiple levels, reflecting CSR [4W]’s model of shared responsibility and sense of community.

Building Fast and Slow looks at the trade workers involved in the construction of architecture and attempts to draw a connection between design and the labor it produces. The investigation analyzes body movements of construction workers building the structural frame of various housing projects. The project breaks down stress experienced in the body based on mechanical output during the framing work. The goal is to find a representation of body stress experienced during the production of the architectural work, making this representation an essential part of the design while also minimizing stresses experienced by the workers of the project. In addition, the project investigates new modes of ownership, which incorporate body mechanic measurements as well as invested labor into the housing ownership models. Applying this approach, Building Fast and Slow creates a showcase for these newly developed labor practices by integrating and preserving the former Cemex concrete plant in Hollywood – a vanishing symbol for the city’s construction sector – into a labor-affirming and labor supporting compound that offers affordable workforce housing, spaces for workforce training and education, public spaces as well as community-oriented programs.

Beyond Traditional Ties focuses on how social setups beyond the nuclear family can foster innovative forms of ownership and living frameworks to move beyond conventional family housing. Drawing from traditions of communal living examples such as the Chinese Tulou, Sumatra’s long houses, or the Shabonos of South America, it proposes a design strategy that can deliver a greater variety of dwellings for both traditional an chosen families. Within the dense and multicultural neighborhood of LA’s Koreatown, Beyond Traditional Ties therefore redefines the omnipresent normative typology of the stucco box to offer more diverse spatial setups and stimulate the potential of prevalently underutilized collective spaces and courtyards. Rather than demolition or simple renovation, the project seeks to revitalize these buildings into flexible co-living spaces, offering room for diverse familial setups, creating useful shared spaces outside of their dwelling units and thus supporting living arrangements within and beyond traditional ties.

SEED [Subscription-based Elastic Endless Dwelling] explores a subscription-based housing model that adaptively reuses vacant office and commercial spaces to transform them into long-term affordable housing. Inspired by models of subscription-based rights of use applied by digital streaming services, SEED aims at creating a dwelling network that offers affordable, diverse, and widespread housing options. Yet, in contrast to the profit-based setups within the digital world, SEED incorporates the subscription concept into a non-profit co-operative structure where every inhabitant/subscriber becomes a collective owner and participant of the network, benefitting not from monetary profits, but from the abundance of choices, sizes, flexibilities, and the endless right to dwell at an at cost price. Integrating an abandoned commercial building in Koreatown into its subscription network not only shows how SEED’s architectural modules and elements enable to retrofit and occupy such abandoned structures, but also indicates how SEED’s spatial and organisational elasticity enables to grow the network almost endlessly at different scales across buildings, urban blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and even the entire nation.

Practopia proposes a concept of urban transformation that is both pragmatic and reminicent of utopian ideas of collective living. Located in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Practopia seeks to introduce new affordable multifamily housing, new community and public spaces, as well as micro-commercial programs to foster a more resilient, self-sustaining, and inclusive neighborhood. Building on the hybrid ownership structure of the Community Land Trust (CLT) model, Practopia envisions a framework for participation, incremental change, adequate densification and preservation, as well as non-speculative housing options. As the CLT model, Practopia itself is a hybrid: creating pragmatic improvements for inhabitants and owners who join the CLT, and advocating for utopian ideas for collective living at the same time, it ultimately serves as a practical, realistic catalyst for a more sustainable, equitable, and community-centric future of a Koreatown block, the whole neighborhood, the city, and beyond.