Seattle United States
Max Bemberg Lecturer
FA18
Yesler Congregation This studio focused on growing cities sustainably, considering the impacts of tech booms, the nature of community building and urban placemaking, and the types of housing that thrive in our current housing market. One of the fastest growing cities in America, Seattle’s population has increased almost 19 percent since 2010. To keep up with demand, developers battle for efficiency, leading to the renaissance of congregate housing. Also known as communal residences or co-living spaces, congregate housing is a place where residents share amenity areas like kitchens, dining spaces, living rooms, storage, and, on occasion, bathrooms. A resident’s private space becomes a sleeping room with enough space for a twin bed and small desk. Critics of congregate housing decry its lack of connection with the community. They see out-of-scale, dense, insular boxes where residents seem isolated from their natural environments, neighborhoods, and city. There are concerns over how these buildings will adapt with the ups and downs of the global economy. If—or when— Seattle’s boom subsides, will the city’s most central neighborhoods be filled with unrentable micro-housing for an abandoned workforce? How can a more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable congregate community be re-envisioned? Can these residences satisfy current housing needs while also adapting to long-term expansion or decline? How can communal housing foster a more robust sense of community, 419 International Housing Studio
both internally and within the greater urban context? Can their design establish a stronger connection with the natural environment? Finally, how can these homes help foster the identity of the individual within a larger collective? Students engaged with Seattle’s bipolar climate—summer months of temperate perfection bordered by dark and damp springs and winters when rain is omnipresent. They were challenged to provide shelter from these conditions while also embracing the potential for passive sustainable solutions. Students were asked to celebrate water through architecture, using buildings as instruments to gather, filter, and reuse this natural resource. Students communal housing proposals were tested at the site of Seattle’s first public housing development, Yesler Terrace. Built in 1941 as the country’s first racially integrated public housing, this historic development was built in concert with the topography, allowing for elegantly alternating bands of housing, covered porches, and yards that blended—and often eroded—areas of private ownership for the sake of collective engagement and shared space. Over the past decade, Yesler Terrace has been fractured by infrastructure and speculative development. As it faces its final days due to expanding market-driven development, students pondered what could be learned from Yesler Terrace’s engagement with the topography as well as its questioning of private and public space.
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