In the context of Houston’s car-centered neighborhoods, distinctive building types have developed in response to the city’s economic and climatic conditions. HOUSTON-VARIATIONS reimagines the drive-in courtyard apartment as a new approach to housing affordability, density, and sustainability in the city’s inner loop. Developed in Houston in the late 1960s in response to a need for affordable housing, this Houston housing type 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 collective, affordable housing projects with luxury townhouses and towers. As speculative development continues to drive up the cost of living, HOUSTON-VARIATIONS reimagines this typology to suggest alternative ways to increase density in the city without causing further displacement.
The project proposes twelve new variations of the drive-in courtyard apartment. 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 a process of limited lot consolidation, the type can expand to include multiple courtyards, interconnected by longer housing bars 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. Beyond recreation, the courtyards are conceptualized as part of the city’s ecological and hydrological infrastructure, and can include detention basins, micro-forests, and even recovered fragments of Houston’s coastal prairie. Small shading and greenhouse structures on the roofs expand this new public ground. As an urban strategy, these types can aggregate into an archipelago of courtyards, increasing density while also creating new ecological worlds.
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