There’s a stack of books on the corner of my desk that never really goes down, because there are a lot of talented writers dealing with some of the same thoughts that we are working on. Most of them circle the same handful of questions: how houses perform, how neighborhoods come together, how streets either … Read more
I went down a design rabbit hole. It started as some fun graphics, then looking up some history, and ended with me doing analysis and assembing the data because it didn’t exist. Welcome to the way my brain works. I found these fantastic reproductions of Pan American World Airways luggage tags shared online, and I … Read more
Airtight. Insulated. Well Ventilated. In the Mt Airy neighborhood of Cincinnati, a 3,200-square-foot home uses 7,000 Btu per square foot per year. Most homes in the neighborhood use seven to ten times that! The house that landed at 7 was designed to three principles. Airtight. Insulated. Well ventilated. At Trilobite, every new-construction and deep-retrofit project … Read more
Eighty Years of Operating Energy. The house you build will operate for eighty years, at least. The car you buy next month will be on the road for twelve. Of the choices a household makes about its environmental footprint, the building decision is the one that compounds the longest. Eighty years of heating. Eighty years … Read more
Six stories. Twenty-four households. Four units per floor. A point access block is a mid-rise apartment building where one centrally placed stair serves every unit on every level directly. Four to six units per floor. Up to six stories under Type I-A or Type II-A non-combustible construction, fully sprinklered, with a pressurized stair enclosure and … Read more
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate on March 12 by a vote of 89 to 10. The House passed its version in February, 390 to 9. Bipartisan support at that scale is rare for anything in Congress right now. Housing got it. The bill is not law yet. The Senate added … Read more
This is Part 4 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers pattern books and BuildReady. Part 3 covers point-access blocks.] A healthy neighborhood has renters. This needs to be said plainly because the national conversation around Section 901 has collapsed into a … Read more
This is Part 3 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers the pattern book program and Cincinnati’s BuildReady initiative.] If there is one provision in this bill that has architects paying attention, it is Section 103: Federal Guidelines for Point-Access Block Buildings. … Read more
This is Part 2 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill’s three major provisions.] A two-bedroom apartment in a middle-tier Cincinnati neighborhood rents for roughly $1.25 per square foot. The wood-frame construction to build that apartment costs roughly $250 per square foot. A 3,000-square-foot duplex runs … Read more
There are thousands of vacant lots in Cincinnati zoned for residential construction. Most of them sit in neighborhoods that lost a quarter of their housing stock in the last fifty years. Almost none of them have a new building on them. On March 12, the U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act … Read more