The Considerable Housing LA Training Fund, a California advocacy group, has introduced the winners of the 2025 Nationwide Single Stair Architectural Design Competitors.
The design competitors was meant to showcase revolutionary single-stair residential constructing design, a burgeoning housing typology in cities across the nation. Scholar Coby Lefkowitz, architect Gerhard Mayer, and design critic Frances Anderton juried the competitors.
Single-stair, multifamily residences have been authorized for the reason that Nineteen Seventies in Seattle, the place buildings as much as six tales want only one stairwell. Different cities like Austin, Baltimore, and Memphis at the moment are beginning to observe go well with with single-stair reforms.
This strategy permits for extra flats, higher pure air flow and daylighting, and faster and extra economical building, the American Planning Affiliation contends. It’s significantly advantageous for infill and small heaps zoned for single-family building, the place sq. footage is valuable.
Per the competitors guidelines there have been three mission award classes: Websites have been in Austin; San Francisco; and Portland, Oregon. First prize winners have been introduced in every metropolis. Single-stair building is at present authorized in Austin and Portland, however not San Francisco, the place reasonably priced housing advocates are now pushing for single-stair reform.
David Baker Architects (DBA) gained first prize within the San Francisco class for its submission, Steplight. The mission is situated on an infill lot and is outlined from the outside by cascading balconies and terraces. Mayer the juror counseled the unit format ideated by DBA for prioritizing “entry to pure daylight and cross-ventilation, and the unit combine affords a balanced vary of condominium sizes to accommodate numerous city households.”
The profitable group in Austin was comprised of Christian Calle Figueroa and Alexis Schulma. Their mission, titled Cadavre Exquis, was sited in a low-rise residential neighborhood. It posits an answer for constructing a lot higher-density, naturally-ventilated, courtyard housing. In describing the mission’s deserves, Lefkowitz stated Cadavre Exquis is “equal components a nice imaginative and prescient for group and radical experimentation.”
“With rainwater assortment techniques, central gardens, brise soleil,” Lefkowitz added, “it asserts that buildings take a firmer function in shaping extra sustainable neighborhoods with out compromising on an important mandate of this system: {that a} constructing be essentially fascinating to dwell in by itself phrases with out yielding to the uncertainty of passionately felt aspiration.”
Interior Backyard by architect Norbert Schlotter took house first prize within the Portland class. That mission is a single-stair courtyard constructing outlined by thick pilasters and horizontal planes. The constructing is lacquered in powder pink and inexperienced paint, and is stacked like a vertical backyard, Schlotter stated within the design assertion.
“This mission had me on the pink and inexperienced, a coloration mixture I really like. Along with the cylindrical and triangular columns and chunky delineation of the ground plates, the result’s a daring and authentic facade,” Anderton stated in describing Interior Backyard. Anderton counseled the mission for its “Babylonian hanging greenery on the within court docket, dripping from the one stair, rework the circulation on the coronary heart of the idea into a pleasant secret backyard.”
Second and third place winners within the 2025 Nationwide Single Stair Architectural Design Competitors have been: James Donaldson, Sidell Pakravan Architects, Jonah Coe-Scharff, Kyle Barker and Mark Rukamathu, Story Dimson Studio, and Su In Kim and Seyun Kwon.
