The Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition organised by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the Binational Softwood Lumber Council (BSLC) and Parsons The New School for Design, has announced their winners.
The competition focused on a site on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with a diverse population of public housing residents, market, the new Lowline and a number of new residential and commercial developments. Students were asked to design places for inhabitation, repose, recreation, and local small scale commercial exchange, as well as the creation of social and cultural exchanges, all while embracing new possibilities of wood. Entrants were challenged to propose construction systems in scenarios that draw optimally on the performance characteristics of not one but a variety of wood technologies.
And first place went to ‘Stack House’ for its inventive formal strategy and expressive use of timber.
“The concept of stacking volumes with core atria dropping down is very nice, creating a lot of visual depth and variation not typically found in New York City,” commented the juror from the competition.
‘Stack House’ is designed by Buddy Burkhalter, Mingjun Yin, and Connor Irick from the University of Washington with faculty sponsors from Richard Mohler and Elizabeth Golden of University of Washington.
The winning piece celebrates the celebrates the vitality and multidimensional community of the Lower East Side by referencing historical building tradition and urban context, integrating with transportation infrastructure, and advancing mass timber construction. By stacking housing similar to the lumber drying process, voids are created to allow for daylight, ventilation, and private and semiprivate amenity spaces.
Some notable projects too are ‘Hybrid Domains’ for its elegany hybridity of systems and ‘Grid + Grain’ for its exciting and convinving urban strategy.
Source: Association of Collegiate Scgools of Architecture
