Public buildings are physical manifestations of what Eric Klinenberg calls social infrastructure. Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as “the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact”. As opposed to physical infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water pipes etc., social infrastructure is the spaces and places that allow for people to come together and create a community. Of all the public buildings that comprise our social infrastructure, libraries are perhaps the best current example of social infrastructure in our society.
Seattle is in the middle of a long running debate on DADUs. For those who are not up on your land use acronyms, DADU stands for ‘detached accessory dwelling unit’, often called backyard cottages, granny flats or in some cases, alley flats. While we think the benefits of DADUs are self-evident, not everyone agrees with us.
Note: Since we originally put this together, the market in Seattle has only continued to get more competitive and prices are reflecting that. We have updated some of our base cost assumptions below to reflect what we are seeing in the office at the moment.
Your home is the most important building in your life. It is your refuge from the world. The place where you spend the majority of your time and one of the few places where you have full control over your environment. Shaping your home is major undertaking and we approach it with respect, eagerness and joy.
"How much does a backyard cottage in Seattle cost?" Not surprisingly, we get that question quite a bit. The correct, although frustrating answer is: it depends. It depends on your lot size and location, your lots topography, your existing utilities, access, desired size, level of finish etc. All of these will affect the total cost of your backyard cottage.
After the phased development thinking, we believed it would be interesting to speculate on how the village might grow. With the Agros land development model, land is purchased and living space is set aside with the assumption that everyone in the village will be farming. At some point further into the future, there will be enough density and chance happenings to combine together for other occupations to develop. How might that growth look? What direction might the community decide is best for their long term development? And more importantly, is there anything that we should think abou
From Option A, we continued to develop and refine the design using more precise dimensioning and site data. The village is split into two areas because the community preferred to have larger lots per house (Option A) instead of keeping all the lots clustered into one area (Option B). In the site analysis, we saw that the steep slopes and agriculture infrastructure restricted the layout growth in Area A. In response we placed the additional lots along the existing road to the west, creating Area B. Don’t worry though—it’s only a five minute walk between the two areas.
For the village layout of this project, we pulled strongly from the exercises and input we received on site in El Ojoche (now named La Benedicion.) As we’re sure you read in the previous post the community had differing opinions on the relationship between civic buildings and their placement in the village layout. There were also differences between the men and women in the proportion of the lot sizes.
While our plans and the rendering below show the full development of La Benedicion, there are many steps between then and now. To help visualize the process of growth, we created a three phased development plan that starts with lot division, basic health block construction and play fields. The play field location plants a seed in the collective memory of the village, connecting the space to a feeling of gathering and communion.
After we completed our series of games and exercised with the community we were faced with a wonderful problem... we have a lot of information to dig through. We had SD cards full of pictures of lot diagrams. We had pages of notes and gigs of movies. Thankfully, we also had Chris.