Excellent Mixed-Use Residential Design
What could a young professional be thinking when stuck in traffic?
Tired after a day at work. Just wanting to get home, but having to wait several cycles of traffic signals just to make it through one intersection, only having to repeat the pattern again to cross the next. The NPR or CBC podcast on the radio just barely suppressing their desire to scream in frustration. There’s certainly time to calculate the substantial portion of one’s spent life sitting in traffic. It eats away at the young professional to think about all the better things they could be doing instead of being stuck inside a metal box. For one thing, there’s more than enough time to contemplate the alternative:
Put on the hat you got online from a fair-trade distributor; tie around your neck the awesome wool scarf your friend made; lace up your rockin’ limited-edition kicks, and walk the short eight blocks to work. Smell the wonderful bakery just opening. Decline the offer of tempting fresh fruit from the grocer. The bookstore looks inviting but isn’t open yet. Enjoy the display of flowers in the florist’s window. Enjoy the trees, fresh air, and morning. The coffee shop on next door looks busy as you arrive to start work.
Bridging the gap between those to visions is redevelopment. But speculation of the trend is almost outpacing the understanding its characteristics. To counter this effect, we first look critically at the best qualities of mixed use residential design before looking at some leading examples of its type.
Key to a successfully integrating a multi-story mixed-use building into an existing neighbourhood is analyzing its context. This brings us first to question mega-developments, multi-acre sites, and skyscrapers, but also highlights the importance of the exterior materials used, and in what combinations. The biggest strike against mega-developments is their scale. I understand the economic pressures to build up, but these developments tend to cast very long shadows, literally and figuratively. Take, for example, One World Trade Center. The reason the building looks like it was design by committee is because the site places demands on the project to be as absolutely economically productive as possible. When the project is complete it will somehow sneak in with a LEED Gold rating but still the waste coming from a building of that size is immense. This is a function of its size, not implementation. China too has a playing-card pack full of high-profile mega-developments planned. And well I applaud their effort to make each architecturally significant, the larger projects blur together in ways that disqualify them from being leaders in the sector. This is how we get to the point of the projects outpacing the trend. So much of good urban design is contextual and historic, there is rarely time during redevelopment to respond to what residents really want.
One can sort of imagine a focus group of users with the developers behind one-way glass; the designers asking questions to find out what the users really want. It’s too easy to paint the developers here as the bad guys in this scenario, praying for answers that allow them to build as tall and cheap as possible. The users can feel the chilly stare from behind the mirror, but aren’t armed to express the multitude of complex factors that go into weaving a healthy urban fabric. Their focus, quite rightly, should be on more important things such as their families, their jobs, throwing fun themed dinner parties, and artisanal bread-making. Most random residents don’t have a background in architectural criticism, and the developers aren’t inclined to pay for architectural merit anyways. At the end of the day , it’s surprising that from these beige rooms where focus groups meet that anything of architectural significance actually emerges. (That credit must go to the designers?) Needless to say, between these two opposing forces, wanting very different things––incompatible things––there’s still a need for sustainable redevelopment.
Scale really is key. Well-designed four, five, six storey buildings should be able to turn a profit in pretty much any real-estate market on the planet except a few true outliers like London and New York, etc. And it’s in these types of neighbourhoods, which can normally be found somewhere in a majority of cities, that well-considered, well-designed mixed-use buildings is really star creating the urban fabric that’s driving the trend. People want to live there. People become champions of their neighbourhoods.
Now changing scales to look at their details, this is where one sees how quality exterior materials facilitate a project’s integration into the surrounding area. There are many novel ways of articulating a building’s exterior, from traditional to modern, and many innovative siding products now cater to this need. Bringing these two things halves together, the design intent and execution, takes great care. Thankfully recycled and reused materials are seeing increased uptake on multi-use residential projects, and now very sophisticated prefabricated patterned panels can be developed with ease in BIM which can contribute to the architectural merit of a project and add visual interest to the street.
By expanding the the variety of design options available in cities––a perspective this article is meant to encourage––mixed-use projects offer a path toward more effective land use in cities. The accompanying increase in density also has the positive effect on the tax-base, growing it, in addition to making public transportations options viable that perhaps weren’t previously. This points toward a main characteristic of mixed-use development: uncoupling cities from car-centered development. Vehicles will always be around. No ones suggesting getting rid of them completely. I still need my Amazon.com deliveries. But finally there seems to be growing recognition that, one, it’s not a law of the universe that cities must develop around cars; and two, that neighbourhoods centered around pedestrians can great places to live! In my experience ARUP has pretty much written the bible for the walkable cities, with the main takeaway being that pedestrian-friendly developments have benefits in four major areas: social, economic, environmental, and political. The whole thing is actually a pretty good read, something I tackled last year when it came out, but I keep going back for its comprehensiveness, and because I’m a strong supporter of walkable cities. (Full disclosure: I do not own a car.) The document is exhaustive in listing the benefits and evidence for walkable-cities. What the document makes clear through its plus 160 pages is that adoption of pedestrian-friendly development is an important piece of sustainable urban design, while I hasten to add through this article that mixed-use buildings sit at the core of its sustainable benefits.
We now turn to ask: which mixed-use projects should we celebrate?
With the demand of mixed-use residential rising, and with it the pressure to redevelop inner cities sustainably, there are currently a lot of examples to choose from. My only caveat was to disqualify mega-projects on the grounds their sustainability benefits were murkier, and contributions to a diverse urban fabric limited.
Take for example Aedas’ gigantic Xihongmen & North Star mixed-use developments in China. I welcome their bold architectural design and seemingly advanced sustainability efforts. Certainly they’re walkable. But in walking around them, one doesn’t necessarily see the diversity of their community — represented now by an undeniably interconnected world— reflected in their design. They’re monolithic. Their scale is so large in fact, it completely undermines effective methods of reuse in the future. No doubt Aedas put in a substantial amount of effort making sure the building’s function matches the current market conditions and forecasts. But I can say with some surety that what functions these buildings will truly be called on to fill in the far-future are completely unknown to everyone. The projects’ extremely large scale and highly specific functions now will make it harder to modify or change them to roles needed in the future we can’t even imagine or recognize contemporaneously with their design and construction.
This leaves us with thousands of mid-sized projects from all over the world to consider. Studying as many as I could for the love of the subject matter, I tried to pick some of the best; some for their achievement in sustainable design, others for their architectural merit. Though generally speaking, each project can be celebrated for their contributions toward sustainable urban design, even if they aren’t each putting energy back on the grid themselves.
Schmidt Artists Lofts, BKV Group, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2015.
Starting first with the most basic type of adaptive reuse, this former brewery––first established on the site in 1855 and then added to many times––was in a very dilapidated state when redeveloped started in 2012. The design group did an excellent job unifying a project that was built earlier in many phases over several decades. The interior is now much brighter, with all the expected modern amenities included, but has kept all the interior and exterior quirks that make these sorts of buildings so desirable in the first place. The project has about 260 units, a small fraction of which are offices.
Celadon at 9th & Broadway. SVA Architects & Studio E Architects. San Diego, 2015.
This project was a strong candidate for inclusion because of its dedication to sustainable design and affordability. Keeping costs minimal, the project only gained LEED Silver in San Diego, despite the radical use of a large photovoltaic system on the southside of the building and supplementing some of the building’s hot water usage with a solar array on the roof. Nonetheless, the project maximizes residential and commercial use of the site in an energy-efficient package in a transit-oriented neighbourhood.
Divercity B, Turner Architects, Waterloo, Australia, 2012.
Contrasting the radical design of the previous example, this example from Waterloo, Australia is simply good. Not every project needs to push the bounds of human creativity, and we should probably more often settle for simply good design. Retail and commercial is located on the street-facing side with the rest of the apartments above creating a wonderful pallet-like effect for all the stories of those inside to to place.
Plot #1282, Architects Bernard Khoury & DW5, Architects Bernard Khoury & DW5, Beirut, 2017.
I could have done this whole post with just examples of mixed-use projects from New York but I like travelling and it’s nice to focus on projects in other areas that deserve credit. I think this project from Beirut, Lebanon, has strong architectural merit. They use a lot of black welded metal on the exterior which I suppose is easy to get and work with locally. The ceilings are super high and windows on both sides make the interior feel very expansive. The shape as well is very evocative and unique. This project is being developed on a grassy inner city lot that is expected to continue to fill up over the next few years which means eventually it will have other structures quite close to it. Part of its architectural merit comes from the area’s lack of juridical restrictions or regulations, giving freedom to radical designs. The five vertical piers which house the building’s vertical services give a sense of solidity to this otherwise highly angular design.
SOHO Fuxing Lu, GMP Architekten, Shanghai, China.
The biggest project included comes from a redevelopment in China for start-up with housing in the tower. The project does an excellent good taking design cues from the surrounding neighbourhood and I was impressed with the overall sophistication of the space planning to make really great living and working areas. The light filled office space in the lower buildings is very inviting but I’m still questioning how much I like the tall residential tower. The designers have definitely gone beyond just a basic rectilinear tower and included many great details but at the same time I wonder how truly integrated it is with the rest of the site.
West Village Mixed-use, Morris Adjmi Architects, New York, 2018
I snuck in this yet-to-be-built building from New York because I was thoroughly impressed with how the design strongly evokes the traditional characteristics of the neighbourhood with just the use of form. It’s a complex feat to pull off. The curved graduations in a masonry medium requires skill to execute. Finished simply in brick, this unpretentious building has strong architectural merit because it accomplishes a quality of timelessness that good design should aim for and adds visual interest to the neighbourhood.
