Following Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of New York City’s adAPT NYC competition in the Museum of the City of New York in late January, 2013, he toured the Making Room exhibition that opened the next day. The exhibition, organized by the museum together with the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC), is subtitled New Designs for Housing New Yorkers, ” and it explores this subject through layout strategies that react to CHPC research on the city’s changing demographics in addition to through finalists’ entries in the adAPT NYC competition, some precedents beyond the town and an entire 325-square-foot apartment. This last piece received the most attention and gave the mayor some fantastic photo ops, but as we will see, it is simply a part of the narrative.
The exhibition and competition are linked through the housing council’s findings which nontraditional households (singles and couples without kids) are on the rise, but there is not sufficient housing stock in their opinion. The city states that there are 1.8 million residents who are singles and couples, but only 1 million studio and one-bedroom apartments in all five boroughs. The competition aims to reach a pilot project with microunits averaging about 300 square feet. The exhibition, on the other hand, is a mixture of hypothetical jobs and design alternatives for living flexibly and economically within small spaces. Both are directed at making New York City cheaper to singles and couples.
Here’s a look inside the Making Room exhibition, which runs in the Museum of the City of New York before September 15, 2013.
John Hill
The exhibition is about the museum’s upper floor, at a gallery that is, unsurprisingly, little. Architectural models and drawings occupy about half the distance, with the rest dedicated to a full-scale microapartment designed and supplied by Clei and Resource Furniture and together with design by Amie Gross Architects. The floor plan is a stubby “L,” together with the living area and kitchen on the long side and the bathroom on the brief side; the entry is between the kitchen and bathroom.
Going into the apartment feels similar to entering an Ikea showroom, given the contemporary furnishings, but the emphasis is on versatility — the living room also acts as a bedroom; the kitchen may be utilized as a dining room; wall storage becomes a home office.
Here we see one wall of the dwelling room, with a couch, open shelves and overhead storage behind doors. The white and shelf panel are key into the space’s versatility.
John Hill
The panel hides a Murphy bed (the Atoll 000), which folds down to flip the living room into a bedroom. What’s unique about this layout is how it straddles the couch: simply move the cushions into the side and the bed may be pulled down. Another nice design touch is the way the shelf stays horizontal, so in theory the items on the shelf do not need to be moved every time the bed is moved up or down.
John Hill
Next into the Murphy bed is full-height storage for coats and other garments. A light comes on once the door is opened, and the clothing rack can be pulled out (notice the mechanism on the side) for easier accessibility.
John Hill
Opposite the Murphy bed is a wall with storage, a moving panel with a flat-panel TV attached to it and a bar behind the TV. A vertical support behind the TV hides the wires and allows it to move about 3 feet from side to side.
John Hill
On the same wall as the moving TV is a storage unit with doors which hides a drop-down desk. As with the closet next to the bed, a light has been built to the piece, over a shelf where notes may be hung with magnets.
John Hill
The kitchen is L-shaped and little, both in terms of dimensions and appliances and fittings — the sink is little, and the refrigerator is beneath the counter, for instance. As much as possible is moved off the counter (such as the microwave) to maximize counter space, one area where even larger apartments in Manhattan are inclined to be missing.
Flexibility from the kitchen is sold through a dining table tucked beneath the counter. It rolls out and contains a leaf that doubles its size, therefore it can seat two comfortably. Folding seats are hung on the wall near the front doorway.
John Hill
The majority of the exhibition out of this full-scale microapartment is dedicated to suggestions for many different new home types which are not permitted under present laws. As an instance, small units (less than 400 square feet) are prohibited in most parts of the town, but those might ideally function as unrepresented demographic. This is the focus of this adAPT NYC competition.
A team headed by Deborah Gans proposed extensions to Tudor-style houses in a neighborhood of Astoria, Queens (near where I live, coincidentally). Current laws don’t permit the proposed extensions, which can be envisioned as accessory components for the old or young. The coloured roofs emphasize the now-illegal areas that would add space to single-family houses.
John Hill
A version of one house shows how the attachment extensions would be executed in a similar speech into the first.
John Hill
Architect Peter Gluck’s team proposed microlofts of 232 square feet and 15-foot ceilings. Each unit includes a sleeping loft and a lesser area which may be used for living, working or both in a flexible layout. The kitchen is small (more of a sink with burners than a complete kitchen), but communal areas, like laundry space and worktables, are supplied. Five components are located on each floor inside walk-up buildings that may be situated on normal infill lots. A variance will be required to permit windows overlooking narrow side yards in addition to for such tiny units.
John Hill
Stan Allen and Rafi Segal proposed “Block/Tower” as a flexible reuse of allegedly obsolete office buildings in midtown Manhattan. Their project sits in the opposite spectrum of the suggestions from Gans and Gluck, who targeted small-scale areas outside of the city’s commercial cores.
John Hill
Their version shows the omnipresent curtain-walled glass boxes of the portion of Manhattan, yet with cuts at the base and up the building, to create “vertical neighborhoods.”
John Hill
Another version and accompanying drawing readily illustrate the idea of open, potentially green spaces snaking buildings up, a means of creating shared spaces inside the vertical neighborhood.
John Hill
Next is a scheme proposed by a team headed by Jonathan Kirschenfeld, an architect famous for developing strangely shaped sites deemed unbuildable by programmers to get single-room-occupancy (SRO) homes. Kirschenfeld is an authority in tiny units, and he applies his expertise to a different demographic on three tons along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. As the model gets clear, the larger scheme comprises a greening of the boulevard to boost the desirability of dwelling on the wide thoroughfare.
John Hill
The proposal comprises a lot of unit forms, like the studios which share a bathroom in the model at right. This sort of plan isn’t brand new (he has used it in SRO layouts, and dormitories use exactly the same design), but Kirschenfeld is a strong critic of innovation in home design, using spoken on events that a large part of the alternatives have already been done.
More:
The Initial microunits are coming to NYC. Take a mini tour
Research the Small Homes segment