Tag Archives: housing

Economical Housing For Students Preserves Historical Facades, Merging The Old & The New

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Canada-based ACDF Architectural firm recently designed an impressive 19-story apartment building in downtown Montreal. It is called the LINK Tower, and it beautifully merges contemporary architectural design with the preservation of historical Victorian facades. This forms a seamless and interesting combination of the old and the new, in the center of Shaughnessy Village.

It is designed to be an innovative solution to the city’s requirement for student housing. ACDF Architecture adopted a preservation-first approach, and saved three historic facades, instead of demolishing them. The Victorian facades were incorporated into the new construction.

Designer: ACDF Architectural Firm

ACDF President, Maxime-Alexis Frappier was focused on creating a seamless “dialogue” between the past and the new tower. “Rather than erasing the area’s history, we wanted to respect it,” said Frappier. The project maintains an important connection to the architectural identity of Shaughnessy Village by preserving the Victorian facades. A the same time, it meets the requirements of contemporary urban living. This initiative was complex and not economical, but it displayed respect and sensitivity for the local community’s history and heritage.

The LINK Tower showcases a lovely modern contrast behind the Victorian facades. The facades are equipped with a bunch of architectural elements – ranging from arched, gabled, and rectangular openings, which add a certain dynamism and personality to the dull and mundane concrete environment of Lincoln Street. Black granite frames and precast concrete heighten the composition while pairing well with the surrounding structures. The LINK Tower was created to be visually intriguing while harmoniously blending with its surroundings. It allows the past and the present to beautifully co-exist, elevating the architectural diversity of the street.

The apartments aren’t as spacious as typical apartments, and they are a bit cramped, but according to ACDF, the design meets student’s needs well without feeling too restrained. It displays an efficient use of available space which reduces operating and construction costs, while also saving energy. It is equipped with 122 units, ranging from studios to three-bedroom apartments. They have all been designed to be economical and easily accessible to students.

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Flat-packed accordion-style house can be easily deployed in emergencies

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While a permanent mode of residence is always ideal for most people, there are times when that is a luxury that they can’t afford. This can happen in times of natural disasters like floods or earthquakes, military deployment in remote locations, or even shelter in a tourist or pilgrimage spot. Temporary housing, on the other hand, feels nothing like a house at all, especially since they’re often made with low-quality designs to make it cost-effective and easy to tear down when no longer needed. A better and longer-lasting solution would be a portable home that can be extended, set aside, and reused as needed, such as this housing concept design that takes inspiration from flat-packed furniture that can easily be set up even by just a handful of people.

Designer: Komal Panda, Suyash Chavan

There has always been a need for portable or easy-to-assemble housing, even outside emergencies and disasters. Being able to put up a roof over people’s heads in a quick and efficient manner never goes out of fashion, and there is an almost never-ending number of attempts to make that practical and cost-effective. Prefabricated housing is one such possible solution, but it still takes a lot of time and effort to put the house together. These types of houses can’t be easily moved once they’ve been built either, which makes them less ideal for less permanent abodes.

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Baadi is a concept that takes the popular flat-pack furniture design to houses, though you don’t exactly assemble one from disparate parts. Instead, you pull out one side of the house, and the rest of the walls expand and unfold like an accordion. This mechanism allows a house that’s big enough for two to four people to be collapsed down to a very flat structure and moved around as needed. The design also makes it possible to deploy multiple houses quickly with only a few people involved, which is a key element when the houses are indeed needed for emergencies.

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Just like flat-packed furniture, however, there is a connotation of such designs being soulless and dry, especially from lack of customization options. Baadi, however, is designed to be modular and flexible, such as in how many panels can be used to extend the size of the housing, as well as colors for the panels. The latter aspect is actually critical when the houses need to be very visible even from a distance, in case identification and location are needed during natural disasters.

Admittedly, the concept doesn’t leave much room for using different materials, though it’s not that hard to imagine how the design can be extended to support a wider variety, as long as they meet the requirements of durability and resilience. After all, such a housing system places greater emphasis on portability and flexibility, while still providing the necessary protection and comfort when regular houses are near impossible to have.

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These eco-friendly pop-up shelters can be transported in a suitcase

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In some of the futuristic tv shows or movies that we watch, we see things that seem small but contain multitudes inside or that are actually big when unpacked. We’ve come to the point though that these are not just sci-fi things but actual, real-life products or at least prototypes. We’ve seen some literal pop-up things that can easily be packed, transported, and then unpacked and constructed, solving some problems we may have when it comes to portability and assembly.

Designer: Maawa

Maawa X is a waterproof and solar-powered pop-up housing solution that can be used for emergency or refugee situations or even for homeless camps that need sturdier housing. While it is still patent-pending, it is a very innovative kind of house that can fit into a suitcase when being transported and can fit 1-2 people when unfolded as it is able to expand to a 3.5 cubed meters house. You don’t even need tools or complicated kinds of assembly lines when putting it up as they say it’s basically like assembling a box.x

The entire house is constructed from cardboard but it is integrated with solar panels so it can protect you from weather conditions (although extreme weather may be too much of course) and give you power as well. It weighs only 13.7 kg so it can be transported through a suitcase to anywhere in the world where it is needed. It is also more eco-friendly than the plastic tents that are used in most settlement camps. The material is recyclable and biodegradable and can be re-used or turned into something else after it has been used.

The Maawa X also has a digital infrastructure so that the organizations can keep track of the units across various sites where they will use it. They are hoping that these eco-friendly shelters will be a solution for millions of people worldwide who may be in need of temporary housing. Hopefully these emergency shelters are sturdy enough to keep the people inside them safe and secure in the short time that they are in need of them.

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This modular housing system in Chile is an ingenious solution to the growing housing crisis

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Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen Architects and The Andes House teamed up to create modular housing that can be configured and modified to build low-cost housing. In a time and age, where the housing crisis is accelerating daily, The Industrialized Building System Prototype is an ingenious solution fabricated by Cromulux in Santiago, with the final assembly taking place in the town of Casablanca, Chile.

Designer: Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen Architects and The Andes House

“The prototype was conceived to give an answer to the urgent global dwelling crisis. We decided to build a house as a first prototype of the Building System but with these parts and pieces that work as a ‘LEGO,’ you can design and build any other typologies,” said architect Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen. The prototype home includes a thick and layered wood fiber panel which is amplified by “wooden sub-modules that link together by a system of locks and wedges. This, in turn, forms a foundation or building blocks for floors, ceilings, and walls.” All of this creates the modular coordination of steel and wood carpentry with no surplus material, and where every part has its own place and function,” Hirigoyen said.

All the panels have been placed and installed within a lightweight structure built using recycled steel. The structure measures 5 meters by 18 meters, in turn building a home that occupies 80 square meters. The panels have been coated with a vapor barrier and corrugated metal plates, which provide ventilation to the facade. The roof has a rather gabled form and is constructed from metal. It forms an attention-grabbing triangular truss on top of the house. “Under its wide eaves, airflow is achieved to deliver fresh air to the interior through the windows below them. It also serves as a fog catcher by condensation, which allows water collection and provides support for solar panels for a 100 percent off-grid electrical scheme,” Hirigoyen concluded.

The interiors of the home include two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an open dining, living, and kitchen space. The home has also been incorporated with a wastewater treatment system. The construction process behind the prototype was smooth, efficient, and streamlined. It needed four onsite crew members, a bunch of wrenches and screwdrivers, and a crane.

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Stackable prefabricated modules are here to create futuristic LEGO-inspired buildings

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PolyBloc is a prefabricated, modular housing solution designed to confront the demands of rapid urbanization and globalized lifestyles.

As the ways we work and live evolve, so do the ways we confront architecture. In direct response to rapid urbanization and the fall of the nuclear family, city architecture, in particular, is seeing major changes. In collaboration with pioneering companies who share their goal of “reimagining today’s habitat,” Paris-based architecture studio Cutwork developed PolyBloc. Designed as a prefabricated building system that implements industrial production and modular construction, PolyBlock is a “means [of] confronting the rising housing crisis.”

Designer: Cutwork

Noting the world’s inevitable pull towards shared spaces and mobile lifestyles, the creatives behind PolyBloc set out with the aim of revolutionizing urban architecture. Initially conceived as PolyRoom, a prefabricated single-room, 21-square-meter (226-square-foot) unit defined by its flexibility and multi-use nature, PolyBloc marks the studio’s larger-scale progression.

Focusing on the reproduction value and modularity of PolyRoom, Cutwork went about developing PolyBloc as a means of “creating adaptive, flexible housing solutions in different contexts, from urban to rural.” Adaptive and flexible in its very purpose, each PolyRoom is outfitted with concealed, multi-use pieces of furniture that save and create space for growing needs.

Designed to be a centralized room without an established purpose, PolyRoom takes cues from Japanese design concepts like ‘washitsu’ and ‘tatami room,’ design modes that reconfigure spaces to accommodate residents’ needs. With this in mind, each module comes stocked with multifunctional furniture like disappearing beds, foldable storage cabinets, and telescopic rail systems that transition partitions and doors to create more floor space.

To further each module’s appeal to cohabitation and multi-usability, PolyRoom is outfitted with living roofs and facades that utilize automatic irrigation systems to embrace different cities’ unique biodiversity. Finding flexibility and multifunctionality in a modular building method, PolyBloc is composed of modules that stack together like LEGO building blocks.

The PolyRoom units from Cutwork essentially can be constructed in bulk and stacked together to form full-sized residential complexes in different cities much quicker than traditional building methods allow. Forward-thinking in their creative process and mission, Cutwork explains, “It’s not only about building objects and spaces; it’s about crafting the systems to build [objects and spaces]–systems to help solve the challenges ahead.”

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IKEA will help turn a Swedish city into a sustainable community

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IKEA is moving beyond the confines of the eco-friendly home to work on sustainable urban living. The flat-pack giant is partnering with the municipality of Helsingborg in its native Sweden on a green community project, known as H22, that takes in agr...

Apple will spend $400 million on affordable housing this year

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This year, Apple will spend more than $400 million on affordable housing projects and first-time homebuyer assistance programs in California. The investment is part of Apple’s multi-year $2.5 billion pledge to combat California’s housing crisis.With...

Airbnb hosts can volunteer to house COVID-19 responders

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Airbnb is dealing with COVID-19 cancellations by providing support to people on the front lines of the pandemic. It's launching a worldwide initiative that will let hosts opt in to offering free or subsidized housing to healthcare workers, first res...