Login
Registered users
A timberland real estate trust wants to feature mass timber building systems in the development of future housing products that solve for social (affordability, loneliness) and environmental challenges (low carbon futures and circular economies). More than 50 percent of seniors in U.S. nursing homes are there due to social deficits (e.g., isolation, outdated housing stock, lack of family or friends for support) rather than medical deficits. Seniors can no longer afford institutional housing with costly medical services. Likewise, disabled populations need housing solutions where on-site operators provide light care services in support of semi-independent lifestyles. The AFH provides an affordable alternative to medicalized housing that can be developed in different types of neighborhoods.
Cast your vote giving a wish to this project.
Contingent on state licensure requirements, AFHs serve between 3-10 adults in small scale, affordable homes that invite cooperative lifestyles among residents. The proposed prototype for five adults is designed to fit within various types of neighborhoods, from single-family residential to urban mixed use with multifamily housing. The corner porch room and roof massing are designed such that either the short side or the long side of the building provide good street frontage compatible in contexts of varying densities and lot sizes. Prototype size is ideal for small start-up owners and their financers who need pattern-based solutions
The one-story courtyard prototype is prefabricated off-site from cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, a low-carbon construction technology. The central courtyard ensures a biophilic (love of life) design where occupants experience a fundamental connection to nature regardless of context. Too, the courtyard ensures that building volume is one-room deep for optimizing cross ventilation and natural light. Biophilic design has been found to promote good mental health, physical fitness, healing, and optimism, important to the challenges associated with aging and navigating disability.
The institutional housing market combining medical care with real estate (e.g., assisted living, memory care, nursing homes) is exorbitantly expensive. The median cost of assisted living is $5,500 USD per month in the U.S. Despite this price point that excludes 90 percent of the population, institutional housing supply has been overwhelmed by demand from baby boomers who are living longer but unable to live independently. Many are overpaying for unnecessary medical services, as their real need is for non-medical assistance, once typically provided by family members. Cooperation is the future—the primary strategy for overcoming economic and social precarity. The prototype is critical in this emerging housing market reliant on small-scale operators (who combine housing with care services) to address one of our greatest social challenges: housing that triangulates solutions for individual care, loneliness, and affordability. The AFH gives undervalued care workers an ownership platform to finally secure a decent livelihood. The prototype’s biophilic design is restorative to human health, while its technology contributes to low carbon futures and a wood-based regenerative circular economy protecting forests. Unlike most housing in affluent societies, the AFH’s pattern-based approach is rooted in social solutions to housing problems.
We see two main areas where we can play an important role in accelerating the volume, sustainability and diversity of housing availability. The first involves supporting innovation in the wood products industry . . . . The second involves supporting the development of offsite construction and nontraditional housing options . . . to provide flexible, efficient alternatives for creating new homes through wood-based construction. Weyerhauser
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States dedicated to delivering urban design work. Originated in 1995, the center advances creative development in Arkansas through design, research, and education solutions. Nationally recognized in public-interest design, the center has its own downtown facilities and 5-6 professional design/planning staff, some who also teach. Beyond the focus on urban projects, UACDC has developed eight place-making platforms to shape civic design and public policy at state and municipal levels. These interdisciplinary platforms include 'missing middle housing,' 'agricultural urbanism,' 'transit-oriented development,' 'context-sensitive street design,' 'watershed urbanism,' 'big box urbanism,' 'smart growth,' and 'low impact development,' vocabularies which are locally articulated but hold universal currency.
