Urban Housing Development

Sponsored by the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh, this was a national competition to develop new housing on a 4-lot parcel of land in a turn-of-the-century sometimes derelict urban residential neighbor. The premise of the competition was to develop housing for the modern, often non-nuclear, family, while respecting the urban setting and zoning of the 4 lots. In this two-unit per lot zone district, CCA developed a two building per lot scheme. The principal building is an L-shaped 2-1/2 story house which maximizes density along the principal street, Kincaid, while opening up to a garden courtyard and southern light to the rear. This house proposes a new flexible typology that can be configured as two semi-independent duplex sub-units or a single large duplex unit, depending on the arrangement of doors and folding partitions. While considered a single residential unit by zoning, this typology might appeal to a variety of modern families: two single, perhaps related, heads-of-household with children; parents with a live-in grown child with children; a family with live-in parents; etc. The two sub-units would share kitchen, bathroom, and laundry facilities located at the corner of the L. The street-long leg of the L capitalizes on the steep grade of Kincaid Street by providing an uphill formal porch entry and a downhill informal entry off a car port. The two entries can also be used independently for each of the two separate sub-units. The house is crowned by a third floor garret-style room which overlooks the courtyard and may serve as a remote playroom for kids, a study, or as a spare bedroom.

Down the slope from the principal L-house is a smaller auxiliary 2-story building fronting on the rear alley, Jordan Way. The ground floor contains a single-car garage and workshop/utility room, while the second floor consists of the lot’s second zoning unit, a studio apartment. This studio apartment may accommodate an extended family member, or a non-family tenant. Alternatively, it could function as almost-home office. The presence of this smaller “out-building” not only preserves the urban character of the alleys typical of this section of Pittsburgh, but it also provides an additional source of income for the land-owner and helps to make the repopulating of the neighborhood viable.  Both buildings were conceived as being readily adaptable to prefab construction technologies.