Archinect - News

Designing for disaster in an increasingly fire-burdened California

2023-04-19T11:45:00-04:00

Each home was considered to be built to shelter-in-place standards, with ignition-resistant construction and materials—a cutting-edge approach for the time, though the standards have since been adopted into state and local codes. They are little fortresses of tile roofs, stucco walls, hardscape patios, and covered eaves. [The] heavy fortification gives the communities—both the structures and the people who shelter in them—an extra chance to survive.

The state is in a bind caused by its dire need to quickly enact affordable housing and the movement of populations into liminal wildland-urban interface zones, both of which are placing more people in the fight or flight predicament that’s leading to more innovations in residential design surrounding the concept of defensible space.

Experts point to homes in the Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood in San Diego as exemplars of fire safety that the rest of the state is still lagging to catch on to, hemmed in by costs that are making defensive evacuation plans harder to execute. “Shelter-in-place really was a theory,” local fire protection specialist Brandon Closs told the MIT Technology Review, “it’s still a work in progress.”

AIA offers strategies for retrofitting multifamily housing for pandemic use

2020-08-14T15:38:00-04:00

The latest building adaptation report from the American Institute of Architect (AIA) highlights steps that building owners and designers can take to retrofit existing multi-family homes for pandemic occupation.

Following recently published guides for schools, offices, and hospitals, AIA has issued its latest set of recommendations, titled Strategies for Safer Multifamily Housing, offering "guidance on how to combine new daily habits, the needs of workers, and stringent hygiene regimens with social, infrastructural, and spatial requirements that aim to keep everyone safe."

The guide offers a collection of strategies for bringing stronger safety precautions to multi-family spaces, including reconfiguring shared entry and package delivery spaces, reconsidering "building flow and user experience" from shared entries to elevators and hallways, as well as thoughts on how units themselves might be redesigned to accommodate the crush of overlapping uses that must now take place within the ...

What side projects and hobbies has the architecture community adopted while stuck at home?

2020-05-05T16:21:00-04:00

Working from home has provided some professionals with extra time in the day. With the subtraction of commute hours, the availability to pursue extracurriculars seems more abundant. While many are using that additional time to manage the kids or navigate other ripples of the pandemic, others are using the time to adopt new hobbies or commence some new side projects.

Huge hill in my backyard was covered in weeds. The dirt on the right side down by the wall was sitting above the ridge at the bottom. My wife and I removed all of the weeds and transferred a bunch of dirt from the right side over to the left to level out the dirt that meets the top of the wall. Photos courtesy of author.

After everything was cleared up, my wife and mother-in-law planted new plants. We have a handful of succulents, some lavender, pomegranate, irises, creeping myrtle, and some others. My father-in-law and I dug the holes. Photos courtesy of the author.

I've been recently gardening more with my wife and I was...