#20kv18

Happy Wednesday from The Demo Team! 

Post Stress-Test: We are to proceed and be bold. 

During these past two weeks, we set our goals to build a mockup of our porch, begin our construction document set, and continue our research regarding marketing through speaking with local developers, Fair Housing Act, and ZIP panels, and storage. We are continuing to press on with our project proposal and push its possibilities into becoming a reality.  

What have we been up to? As pictured above, the inset porch of our design has been constructed as a mockup to help us test window/door placements as well as spatial and light qualities. This study proved that the porch we have been constantly drawing is NOT too deep, and the installation of solar tubes is not necessary on our porch because there is plenty of great light in the space. Especially with having a white color for siding, light is able to reflect and bounce around the space. And, of course, we have definitely learned quite a few things about how we will construct some of these components in the future. 

Just yesterday, we had the pleasure of having, Associate Director, Rusty Smith come by for a review! We had a very helpful discussion about how to push the porch to become something more for the home, how the flexible living space and primary living space could potentially have different relationships with the porch, and how to get the most out of our mockups.

Our next set of goals are: to build a second and very detailed mockup of three key walls in our design, meet with a local developer, conduct a post-occupancy interview, finish up our construction document set, further develop the porch, and refine the final design of the home!  

Happy Tuesday from the Demo Team!

We’re back at it in full force once again. Within the last two weeks, we had the pleasure of having reviews with Peter Gluck from New York, Katrina Van Valkenburgh + Mike Newman from Chicago as our guest critics.

Here is where we are in the project, currently: down to one plan + initiating the detailing process!  After taking the floor plan through an infinite amount of iterations, we tested different family scenarios in the floor plan through “[Atelier] Bow Wow” drawings.  We have imagined the extreme - however, very real - scenarios as well; such as, challenging the 2-bedroom home to potentially house 6 people, perhaps more!  We have concluded that the one floor plan that we moved forward with gives a clear diagram and provides a flexibility that is very much needed in multigenerational families and affordable homes.  But, of course, design is never finished!  There are a few things to rework: add a window in the front facade and squeeze the sqft. some more.

Now, we are placing studs in our walls, getting the windows and doors spec., detailing our corner connections, deciding between “R” metal panels or hardie plank for the exterior siding material, and deciding between fiber cement panels or hardie plank for the in-set porch walls. Also, color palettes.

Lots to do before construction, but we are on our way!

Our first step as a team was to dive into demographics research. This meant looking at pages upon pages of census data, and trying to draw some meaningful conclusions from it. We looked at everything from how many children live with only their grandparents, to how many houses have dining rooms. This is what we concluded: on a national level, a new household type that can change our housing design considerations is on the rise.

 This household type contains an “extra” member that is not included in a typical nuclear family, e.g., a mom, dad, and kids. This extra family member could be a grandparent, an aunt, an adult son, a family friend, or even someone renting part of the home. In the United States, thirty-eight percent of multi-person households have these members. We believe that this percentage is a significant part of the housing market, and their needs should be considered. Furthermore, with multigenerational households increasing from 3.9 million to 5.1 million in only ten years, we believe that this percentage will continue to grow.