DENSITY DESIGNS WITH STYLE
Winners of Urbanarium's design competition look past current building practices
On April 16, Urbanarium announced the winners of Decoding Density, the latest iteration of the nonprofit's affordable housing ideas competition. A Vancouver group, Switch, tied with New York's Studio Oh Song for first place.
The competition received 85 proposals from nine countries, with participants ranging from students to housing advocates, and design and architectural professionals to urban planning enthusiasts.
An Auckland, New Zealand, group took third place, and three more local firms, as well as groups from Seoul and Cincinnati, received honourable mentions. Prizes totalled $44,000.
“It's Urbanarium's third design competition, and I think we're starting to get a bit of a name for ourselves internationally,” said Kari Dow, a co-chair of the Urbanarium competition committee.
“The Metro Vancouver region does tend to get quite a bit of international design interest, so we weren't that surprised to see so many international proposals. But we were quite happy to see them.”
According to Urbanarium's brief for Decoding Density, the competition's goal was “to solicit ideas that explore the two most urgent challenges of today: housing affordability and climate change, at the upper range of Missing Middle density.”
“Missing Middle” refers to building types and densities between single-family homes, larger apartment complexes and condo towers. Examples include side-by-side duplexes, stacked duplexes, townhomes and courtyard apartments.
Competition participants were also encouraged to challenge current building codes — “The six-storey apartment form is ripe for reconsideration” — and incorporate shared spaces that would “promote neighbourliness and community.” Competitors were asked to envision their projects on one of four imagined sites of varying sizes and access points to amenities.
Shared Density, the Vancouver team's co-winning proposal, calls for two buildings on a 15.23-metre by 36.6-metre lot. An elevated courtyard separates the two buildings, one four storeys, the other eight. Together, they house 16 units. The project could potentially work either as an at-market condo or purpose-built rental development.
The Switch team believes that the practicality of Shared Density helped win the day.
“We wanted to do something that could be built tomorrow,” said Jonas Thalamas, who makes up Switch along with fellow architects and developers Charlie Petit, Kareem Negm and Chris Quigley.
“But we also wanted to see what we could achieve by removing some of the limits.”
The team's proposal also seeks “to maximize the interaction between the building and the street, to bring the street into the building, and to maximize the shared space between the buildings.” A proposed green roof would “manage water retention and let small wildlife flourish.”
Both Petit and Thalamas are from Belgium, which they believe influenced some of their ideas.
“Most of the briefs we would see would be about shared space, collective residential buildings, and things like that,” Petit said. “We're also fairly used to that type of building with only one egress staircase up to eight storeys. It definitely helped us while we were designing just to know that it could be built and still be enjoyable for people to live there.”
Decoding Density follows Urbanarium's 2018 and 2022 competitions, Missing Middle and Mixing Middle, respectively. These “were smaller-scale design projects and meant to be more of a townhouse-type density,” said Dow.
“Decoding Density is really around six-storey-plus apartment form. It's been a bit of an evolution throughout the design competition going towards the higher end of the Missing Middle spectrum.”
Dow, a senior urban designer and lead planner for the City of Vancouver's City Design Studio, says that Urbanarium's competitions are having a real-world impact.
Upon winning Mixing Middle, Vancouver-based Team Contingent presented to people from the City of Vancouver's planning department.
“Those ideas, and other ideas from the Missing Middle design competition, directly informed the development of the multiplex policy that was recently approved citywide,” Dow said. “And we expect the Decoding Density design competition to also inform some of the work that we're currently doing on our low-rise apartment forms across the city.”