After designing 44 affordable-housing projects over the last 30 years, San Francisco architect David Baker has developed a formula for making them look like their market-rate cousins: “You build 20 percent with high-end materials, and the other 80 percent with less expensive ones.
Not far from where the Chama River meets the Rio Grande, about 30 miles north of Santa Fe, the Ohkay Owingeh—one of 19 federally recognized Native American Pueblo tribes in New Mexico—live on land they have inhabited for at least 600 years.
The evolution of Finnish architecture is most clearly manifested in the nation's residential projects, especially social housing, the most regulated form of building construction.
When the Jardim Edite favela was scheduled for demolition by S'o Paulo's city authorities, most of its 800 families had little expectation that they would be allowed to remain in their neighborhood.
The beachfront city of Santa Monica, California, with its stylishly laid-back restaurants and hotels, plus freeway access to downtown Los Angeles, may not seem the obvious place for affordable housing.
The 28th Street YMCA opened in Los Angeles in 1926 on an upbeat: the Spanish Colonial Revival building offered the African-American community a sparkling recreational facility with an indoor pool and affordable accommodations for young men who were migrating from other regions (and prevented by color barriers from staying at ordinary hotels).
Behind the eye-catching design of the 969,000-square-foot Rey Juan Carlos Hospital in the Madrid suburb of M'stoles, Spanish architect Rafael de La-Hoz has created a therapeutic atmosphere, organizing the building around accessible atria that help orient patients and immerse them in a protective, inward-looking environment.
A Prescription for Campus Care: Lake|Flato renovates and expands an outdated health-services facility at Arizona State University, Tempe. Built as two structures in 1953 and 1968, the Health Services'Tempe Building (HSTB) at Arizona State University (ASU) had become inefficient and out of rhythm with the vibrant, growing campus around it. Designed by San Antonio'based Lake | Flato in collaboration with architect of record Orcutt | Winslow of Phoenix, the overhauled, 36,900-square-foot HSTB is light-filled, inviting, and designed for LEED Platinum certification. Its gardenlike environment is a refuge for the campus's 60,000 students when they need medical treatment and guidance. Located