INTERSTITIAL DWELLING:
HINGING ACADEMIA & COMMUNITY
Housing Studio
Collaboration w/ Trevor Schur
Summer 2012
This project focused on a new intervention that would fuse student housing with community needs within Camp Washington in the Cincinnati area. The chosen site is a unique sliver that sits between major heavy traffic to one side, and quiet residential row houses on the other. This site was chosen for its unique problems of traffic noise spilling into the residential zone,, and as a site of spectacle with the prevalent billboards that fill the site. The project attempts to reconfigure the normative perception of the row-house and student housing typology, while also addressing issues with noise, site strategies, and hinging the relationship between students and the greater community.
In-Between Space
The site strategy for this project was all about the in-between space, or the interstitial. The diagram is quite simple: the ground floor community bar, the slightly tilted row-house bar that sits above, and the student housing tower that the two previous bars collide into to create the “public hinge”. The two bars span across the entire length of the site to create the auditory barrier needed for the existing community away from the highway traffic. The circulation of the row-houses is loaded toward the traffic side to create a buffer from the housing. The large diagonal bracing along with multiple scrims help as noise barriers. Finally, the student housing tower becomes a reinterpretation of the multiple billboards that visually did nothing for the site. In this case, the tower becomes an active beacon of students and community.
