Make Me a Home Competition

COMPETITION FINALIST AND SPECIAL JURY SELECTION

 

The YUDW led a team of recent graduates of the Yale School of Architecture to prepare an entry for this international design competition sponsored by developer Urban Splash, for a residential zone in Stockton-on-Tees, England.  The YUDW master-plan started with a simple rethinking of the traditional urban townhouse, with its intimate relationship to the street and its neighbors.  By turning it 90 degrees so its long wall faces the street, the house is given shallow floor-plates with windows on both sides of every room—and the accompanying access to copious natural light, cross ventilation, and views—while retaining the compactness and scale of the traditional house.  

 

Through a taut, striated urban fabric, the master-plan responds to a variety conditions on the site such as southern exposure, change in elevation, and climate, while reacting to prerogatives set about in the master-plan, like the notion of community, family, and a relationship to the environment.  A series of narrow urban lanes running north-south are wide enough to allow sunlight to fall on the street from the south, yet narrow enough to feel cozy and village-like.  

 

Three linear “green spills” which alternate with the lanes are a new kind of neighborhood infrastructure, physically and psychologically serving as tributaries of the waterfront.  They have an intimate relationship with the houses that line their edges, whose patios and terraces interlock with them.  They serve a variety of functions, including turning runoff from rooftops and paved areas into an asset and  allowing flora and fauna to flourish along corridors which link the riverfront north to the boulevard and beyond.  These green spills are an amenity to be walked, biked, and viewed.    

 

The waterfront is at the heart of this community’s identity.  The plan transplants the notion of the town green to the waterfront, where a series of urban “jewels” introduce the project, with all day solar access.  These jewels house a café, day-care center, and a town hall – a central gathering space for community life.