Any City, Any State, USA
Social spaces are introduced, that extend apartment living into a shared stairwell that otherwise simply functions as circulation. The American garden apartment—two sets of triplexes that share a single staircase—constitutes more than one-half of all apartment housing construction in the U.S.
Unlike mid-rise commercial-grade housing, garden apartments are compatible with suburban development codes and the International Residential Code (IRC), making them affordable and easy to develop.
Socializing the Garden Apartment by University of Arkansas Community Design Center, won a Future House Award 2026 from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and Global Design News.
Yet, the typology is merely an expression of capital and expedience, lacking social ambition and content in its pattern language.
Along with retooling the garden apartment’s capacity to promote conviviality and cooperativity, its construction technology substitutes off-site mass timber fabrication for wasteful 2x light-frame wood construction.
Social innovation is accompanied by technological innovation in achieving communitarian housing forms that hedge against economic and care deficits.
This building prototype employs mass timber technologies using a glulam rigid frame with cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels.
Stacked glulam Vierendeel trusses house the stairs, creating articulated breezeways with screened porches, play areas, and shared ground-level patios and decks above for socializing.
The Vierendeel truss allows customized stacking and cantilevering in providing a vibrant range of private and semi-private shared spaces. The breezeway now recognizes ground and sky as a vocabulary in making variation within a prototype, and thus its urbanity.
Indeed, the breezeway as infrastructure and an extension of site circulation suggests a portfolio of liminal or in-between spaces independent of the dwelling unit. Neighborhood making may begin with what was once the “generic” or the adjunct to the core work of the building.
Project: Socializing the Garden Apartment
Architects: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Design Team: Stephen Luoni, Claude M. Terral III, Tarun Kumar Potluri, Kacper Lastowiecki, Joshua Levy, Kayla Ho, Victor Hugo, Cardozo Hernandez, Caleb Rothell, Marty Matlock, Jacob Caylon Alford, Keturah Bethel, Mary Grace Corrao, Matthew A. Scott, and Wenjie Zhu
Client: Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund
Photographs Courtesy of the Architects
