Homewood Common

Category

Year

Architectural Design

2021

Role

Architectural Designer

Skills

Rhino, Adobe Illustrator, Worldbuilding

Under the framework of commoning, this project proposed new shared cooperative ownership of a site in Homewood, Pittsburgh. Through adaptive reuse of vacant buildings and existing materials, we aim to repair and care for the existing underutilized buildings to establish an open-participatory and temporal design framework.

Team project with Tracy Meng

Homewood Common

📑Background

Homewood is a disenfranchised neighborhood in Pittsburgh that suffers from the history of redlining and the violence of erasure. 95% of its residents are African American and 45% of the residents are below poverty level. Our specific site looks at two city blocks of rowhouses off of Hamilton Ave, which are regarded as the symbol of blight in the neighborhood.

📑Background

🗺️Worldbuilding

How can we empower the residents to transition from bottom up? Our answer is ownership. Under the broader framework of commoning, we proposed a housing cooperative of shared ownership of this site. Through material reuse, maintenance and care, and temporal reprogramming of participatory design, we transformed the existing buildings into a mix of housing and shared work spaces.

🏘️Process

The architectural process started with identifying 3 types of conditions—corner lot, vacant lot, and row of houses. We used a 3D grid as the organizational system and introduced new resident types to develop a matric of forms and programs.

🫂Participatory Design

Along with the formal and programmatic process, we also looked at its implications in terms of material, time and labor, breaking down into three levels of labor expertise and how they correspond to the lifespan of the participatory framework. Certain building components will be more permanent (i.e., columns, beams) and others more flexible (i.e., internal partitions).

✨Project Highlights