COURTYARD HOUSING . COMPETITION
site: Portland, Oregon
collaboration: A.J. Naeger

program description:
Affordable Courtyard Housing . Sustainability

The Portland Courtyard Housing Competition was a national design competition open to both students and professionals. The program stressed the importance of affordable familial living with a major emphasis on safety and sustainability. There was no actual site for the project other than proposing that the final design could fit in a number of typical Eastern Portland neighborhoods.

A major concern for the project was how to incorporate a multi-family dwelling space into traditionally single family neighborhoods. The design themes of the project were developed from ideas considered by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander in the book Community and Privacy. The main consideration was that each home would have a “buffer zone” from the home adjacent to it. “Buffer zones” were also created within the household to separate the private living functions from the public social functions, allowing for public housing that could also be internally intimate.