Kanner Architect's 26th Street Low Income Housing project thoroughly integrates a sustainable approach with high caliber Modernist design, effectively challenging the paradigm for affordable urban housing.

Located in Santa Monica, California, the project—which won both an AIA National Honor Award and an AIA National Housing Award—is a celebration of the environment. Providing open spaces at every opportunity in this urban setting, the design takes advantage of fresh air, sunlight and open sky.

The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 established the grid as the principal ordering mechanism for the speculative territory of Manhattan.

The regularity and homogeneity of its 2,028 proposed blocks functioned as a limiting device that has largely prevented the imposition of larger more dominant systems that would evade its constraints – ensuring an ease of vehicular and pedestrian flow that aerates the dense porosity of the city. Where this system breaks down or is interrupted, pathologies can develop in the local urban tissue and the social vibrancy that typifies street life in New York is subject to retardation and stagnancy.

The T-Husene is a mixed-use development, for Ørestad, Copenhagen (Denmark) presented by Steven Holl Architects for a direct commission from City Development in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Besides a constructed landscape of 8000 sq. m. T-Husene contains 18,000 sq.m. residential space in 5 towers above 12,500 sq.m. commercial space.

Watercolors are courtesy of Steven Holl

The featured housing block is situated at the edge of a housing development that projects the construction of 650 apartments. After construction, the design was acquired by the Slovenian Housing Fund and will be replicated in other developments.

With a rich interplay of small volumes of different material interlocking throughout the elevations, many people associated them to Tetris game. And so the building got its name.

All photographs © Tomaz Gregoric

After two and a half years of planning, design, and construction, Bernard Tschumi’s BLUE Residential Tower is now open on the Lower East Side.

The seventeen-story tower contains thirty-two apartments and rises to a height of 181 feet. This is Tschumi’s first high-rise structure, and his second in New York City, where his main office is located. BLUE also marks Tschumi’s first residential structure.

The VM Houses, shaped like a V and an M when seen from above, is the first residential project to be built in the new district of Copenhagen known as Ørestaden.

The upcoming neighborhood is connected to the center of the city by the new metro system The manipulated perimeter block of the V building is clearly defined in its four corners, but opened internally and along the sides. The vis-à-vis with the neighbouring M house is eliminated by pushing the slab in its centre, ensuring diagonal views to the vast, open fields around.

Experimental Project Serves as a Model to Solve Housing Shortages.
 
BIG ISLAND, HI—Solving a major housing problem for Hawaii, MVE Pacific and UniDev Hawaii are embarking on a major community and housing development to serve the growing workforce of Hawaii’s Big Island.  Kamakoa at Waikoloa—a 275-acre, 1,200-unit workforce housing development on the Kona side of the Island—broke ground December 29, 2007.  The first buildings are expected to be complete in 2009.  Honolulu-based MVE Pacific is a full-service architecture, interiors and planning firm that has created significant housing, commercial, resort, retail, mixed-use and hospitality projects in Hawaii for the past 20+ years.