086 DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE
Right Holst Architecture’s Argyle Gardens is designed to help homeless citizens of Portland, Oregon get back on their feet with well-designed, affordable housing
Far right Four buildings, with space for 24 residents in each, have been built around a single central communal courtyard
Light] had been able to return to the building once it was allowed to reopen. It explained that the reception area and circulation spaces were well-suited to the creation of safe circulation routes, and that the building design was making visitors feel at ease with themselves and their surroundings.’
Although pandemic-friendly circulation routes are a challenge that nobody anticipated – though they may well become integral to any future brief for public buildings – there were other challenges for the design team, particularly around safeguarding elements. ‘We’ve got schools in there,’ says Richardson, ‘and there are issues around putting that within a public building: there are no restrictions to people coming into the building, so we need to provide a safeguard for those students, while making them feel part of it.’
Tis they achieved by putting the public and sports areas on the ground floor, and education and mentoring on the second floor, with clear views from interior balconies on to the activities below. Tis was important, says Richardson, to ensure that ‘they still feel part of it: it’s that aspirational thing, where they are coming into a school that’s got sports facilities far greater than usual. Tat whole integration was unusual, but key – combining education space, sports, health and well-being and the world of work.’
Tis typology, he says, is unique, and could only be achieved because it was run under the umbrella of a charitable trust – no local authority would have been able to provide that kind of joined-up thinking or, more to the point, funding. ‘Tis was a demonstration of how you can bring those together in something that’s hopefully greater than the sum of its parts, and a real asset to the community.’ Homelessness was already a major problem across the world prior to the pandemic, and the increase in joblessness that is likely to result from a world constrained by lockdowns means the threat is bigger than ever. At a video seminar hosted by Salus Global in summer 2020, entitled ‘Building a healthy and health- creating society’, Te Big Issue creator John Bird (now a member of the House of Lords) declared: ‘Tere will be about 1 million more people dipping into homelessness unless we act now.’ And that was just in the UK. Luckily, this is an area where architects have long been devoting spare time, energy and inventiveness, and the first lockdown last year saw proposed solutions proliferate as well as completed projects (see Argyle Gardens case study, right).
Morris + Company has recently secured planning permission for a scheme in Newham,
Bottom right With some rooms going for as little as $300 a month, the project is the first of its kind in the US
CASE STUDY
HOLST ARCHITECTURE: ARGYLE GARDENS
With the US’s low income and homeless communities the hardest hit by the pandemic, there was some cause for celebration to see the country’s first prototype, modular, affordable housing scheme finished during the summer lockdown in Argyle Gardens, Portland. Commissioned by local organisation
Transition Projects, the scheme was designed by Holst Architecture. It reimagines the affordable single room-occupancy housing that has slowly disappeared across the US, impacting not just migrant jobseekers, but those whose family relationships have broken down and are seeking to avoid homelessness, as well as people struggling to lift themselves out of it. Those single-room lodgings that remain – usually 200 rooms or more – are less likely to foster a sense of
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