Archinect - Features

For Affordable Housing, The Revolution Will Be Modularized

2021-07-28T14:51:00-04:00

Across the globe, the design and construction of affordable housing is failing to meet demand, leaving both low and middle income dwellers with little choice but to accept high costs, substandard conditions, or a move away from urban centers. This reality not only presents dangerous environmental and social conditions, but also underpins a fundamental failure of our current processes to design and construct quality affordable housing. In the face of this crisis, architects are finding opportunities for change. In this article, we speak with architect David Wallance FAIA, whose new book The Future of Modular Architecture sets out a paradigm-shift vision for the future of affordable housing. Here, we discuss the details of Wallance’s industrial-scale system, derived from the standard dimensions of intermodal shipping units, as well as the major changes such a system would bring to cities, housing markets, the environment, architectural education, and the business structure of the arch...

David Baker Architects on Growing a Team-Based, Family-Friendly Practice

2019-08-07T10:37:00-04:00

San Francisco's David Baker Architects is a leading office in the realm of affordable housing design. Founded in 1982 by University of California, Berkeley-trained architect David Baker, the firm has designed over 8,000 units of affordable housing across the San Francisco Bay Area, and has garnered hundreds of design awards, including the American Institute of Architects California Council's 2012 Distinguished Practice award.

Baker, who was elevated to the AIA's College of Fellows in 1996, runs the practice with principals Amanda Loper and Daniel Simons. Their work, which spans affordable, senior, workforce, and low-income housing types, is distinctive for the inventive sense of materiality and playful but dignified formal approaches the architects pursue as they go about fulfilling the myriad and sometimes tedious requirements specific to these types of projects. Using this approach, the team strives to concretize their "passion for and deep understanding of the power of humane an...

Summary, a Small Portuguese Firm, Finds Their Speciality in Standard and Low-Cost Building

2017-10-23T09:27:00-04:00

Summary is a young architectural studio based in the Science and Technology Park of University of Porto, Portugal, founded by Samuel Gonçalves. Recent winners of the esteemed Red Dot Award in the "habitat" category, the firm has become known for projects such as the 'gomos house' and their installation for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, that focus on prefabrication and simplifying solutions to the building process.

In the following Small Studio Snapshot, we talk with the studio about their founding, the specialization driving their projects, and their unique graphic design.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Modulex, Lego's Building System for Architects

2016-11-03T11:52:00-04:00

A success among urban planners but a failure among architects (with the exception of Eero Saarinen, who used them in his prototype modeling stages), Modulex—the architectural modeling Lego-offshoot—was largely shuttered by the 1980s, almost revived in 2015, and now serves as an XS cult classic in architecture.