HOUSTON-VARIATIONS reimagines the courtyard apartment as a new approach to housing affordability, density, and sustainability in the city’s inner loop. The drive-in courtyard apartment, developed in Houston in the late 1960s in response to a need for affordable housing, is a hybrid of what Reyner Banham describes as the LA “dingbat” and the garden apartment. The type consists of a two-story multifamily apartment building, elevated with parking underneath. A shared courtyard brings in light and air and provides external circulation to the units. Today, Houston’s real estate market is rapidly replacing these types with luxury townhouses and towers. As speculative development continues to drive up the cost of living, HOUSTON-VARIATIONS imagines alternative ways to increase density without displacement.
The project proposes twelve new variations of the drive-in courtyard apartment, testing to what degree the type allows for a recalibration of the relationship between environmental enclosure and form. The ground floor retains a simple material palette of CMU shear walls, steel columns, and spanning I-beams, and a redesigned envelope transforms the second-floor facade into a flexible, layered system of operable panels that maximizes light and air and reduces reliance on air conditioning. In plan, a sequence of repeated kitchen and bathroom cores is arrayed along a grid, alternating with double-height living spaces and sequences of bedrooms to create multiple unit types. Through limited lot consolidation, the type can expand to contain multiple courtyards, interconnected by longer bars of housing and breezeways. The project plans for the future obsolescence of parking requirements, converting the ground-floor spaces into shaded breezeways and multifunctional spaces that connect the courtyards to the street. As an urban strategy, these types can aggregate into an archipelago of courtyards, increasing density while also creating new ecological worlds: kitchen gardens, detention basins, micro-forests, and recovered fragments of Houston’s coastal prairie.
HOUSTON-VARIATIONS is the recipient of the 2022 RDA Houston Design Research Grant.
Project Leads: Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting
Design & Research Team: Amanda Skyler, Yao Xiao, Jianing Cui, Jane Van Velden, Christopher Sanders
Case Study Photographs: Sean Fleming / smfleming.com