
These open houses drew large crowds and positive responses from the local citizens. Neighborhood Housing Services conducted six open houses, which allowed neighborhood citizens to tour F10 to learn new ways to improve the efficiency of their own homes. Materials and details are contemporary and per program, allowing the house to fit in without relying on superficial historic details.į10 revitalizes the community by utilizing a vacant lot, creating community interaction (through the close siting of the house towards the street) and motivating neighborhood citizens to improve their own homes.Īlthough there was no formal community planning process, the community was very involved throughout the project, from the local alderman's endorsement to strong participation in public open houses. F10’s form and mass are consistent with neighboring dwellings. F10 was raised 4’ above grade with a basement in order to raise the porch and steps to fit in with the other houses and foster community interaction on the street. All setbacks were within zoning guidelines the front setback was consistent with other homes on the street. F10 is intentionally small to allow for future growth on the lot-such as an in-law dwelling-and to keep the building’s site coverage low. No master plan existed for the area, but we mandated that F10 should be socially and visually integrated into the community. While we demonstrated how our design could be fitted on either site, F10 was ultimately built at 1919 N. These were the only vacant lots in the area. Two adjacent lots were selected where single-family houses once stood. It includes a rear alley and is surrounded by single-family, detached residential buildings. This 125’ x 25’ lot is oriented east-west. The City of Chicago Departments of Housing and Environment chose a site within a typical urban residential neighborhood.

The C/A phase was quite different from that in our normal projects in that there was no fee for regular on-site visits, and the architect was not included in much of the decision-making process.Ĭommissioning will be performed by the Chicago Neighborhood Housing Services. Although the contractor was extremely efficient, the aggressive schedule resulted in material and product substitutions across the board. Because of significant delays in construction (two years), all but the foundation of F10 was completed in the five months between March and August of 2003. A third contractor was brought in to finish the remaining two houses, including F10.

The first contractor was terminated, and the second contractor finished only three of the houses. The City had great difficulty with contractors because the budget set for the homes was minimal for affordable housing, let alone affordable green housing. We encountered a few hurdles in design because the building and zoning departments were not originally included in the process. For instance, they thought the green roof was intended as an accessible rooftop garden rather than its actual purpose of an insulator and a mechanism for stormwater runoff minimization. It was challenging to convince decision makers of this new way of thinking about design. The initial design was completed when green design was still relatively new in Chicago.
