Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition winner imagines new homes for New Orleans

Image courtesy USGBC Natural Talent Design Competition 

A group of local building industry students recently won regional honors in the US Green Building Council's regional Natural Talent Design Competition and are off to New Orleans to compete for the national prize.

"I think this may be a good opportunity to discuss the great level of talented new creatives moving into the Portland area," wrote Ron Spencer, one of the winning team members. "It also brings up the power of collaboration between the professions, I think it is safe to say that it's rare to have a construction manager on a design team."

Besides Spencer, who received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Oregon in 2009 and is currently studying for MBA in Green Development at Marylhurst University, the team included Joe Douglas, a construction manager at Performance Contractors Group; Jackie Kingen, a Masters of Architecture student at the University of Oregon; Anna Winn, who earned her Bachelor of Interior Architecture from the University of Oregon  in 2009); and Sean Grummer, a recent University of Colorado architecture grad.

Image courtesy USGBC Natural Talent Design Competition 

Offered by the USGBC and The Salvation Army, the 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition challenged entrants to design an affordable, 800 square foot green home for an elderly client in the Broadmoor, New Orleans neighborhood. Broadmoor is a low-income area still devastated by the effects of hurricane Katrina.  The competition requested ideas for houses have a budget celing of $100,000. The houses also needed to be higher then the flood plane of Katrina, seven feet, as well as ADA accessible (many in the community are elderly).  "So you can imagine," entrant Ron Spencer joked, "you need one heck of a ramp to make that work."

The team's solution, "was risky and bent a few of the rules, but for good reason," Spencer adds. "This resulted in us being the only entry to actually look at the effects of all 100 units being built.  Rather then recreate another mundane rigid community we tried to create a new community that thrived and was allowed to grow and heal together.  You can have an extremely beautiful object, but in isolation it is still just that, an object.  Once that object is grouped with many of it's own kind, the uniqueness of it is lost.  Therefor it was critical to observe this project from many angles and scales.  I am very pleased with what we created and feel it could truly help this community in need."

Image courtesy USGBC Natural Talent Design Competition 

The entry won the Cascadia region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia and will now compete in the national finals. Four finalists' projects will be built, and over the course of the following year, the house that operates the best in terms of efficiency and other factors will be used as the design for building an additional 99 homes.

Comments

[kyle]

bravo. I think the solution is forward thinking and very much appropriate with the choice of options of how to age in your house, or rent, raise a family, later sublet or whatever you chose. Case by case obviously parking will have to be a consideration whether a one off, or multiple residences, and how they can combine parking or do a garden/parking alley on the back - the solutions are many.