Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design

Stoyan Georgiev

Anoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design

Architecture

Faculty Mentor: Prof. Rachel Schade

Architecture, Design & Urbanism

Wolfram Arendt

Co-Mentor

Designing a sustainable and affordable rowhome

According to the EPA in 2016, commercial and residential buildings contributed 11% of the US carbon emissions in 2016, and the electricity sector 28%. Row houses are the most common building type in Philadelphia, consisting of 60% of buildings according to the Washington Post in 2015. The logical conclusion is to make row homes more sustainable so that our carbon footprint in Philadelphia can be reduced, and this project tries to do just that.

As part of this research we joined the local Living Building Challenge (LBC) community, in partnership with Community Ventures, a non-profit developer of affordable housing, to create a hypothetical project of eleven rowhomes on a block in the Belmont area in Philadelphia. This strives to achieve the LBC certification, one of the most difficult to achieve for sustainable design, while also keeping the affordability of traditional rowhomes. We approach the challenge from multiple angles, from water and energy conservation to smart building materials. While this project focuses mainly on design, we have explored this challenging standard and projects that have achieved it. We aim to create a model project that can inform better, more affordable and sustainable housing in the future.