The concept of this design was to create urban infill on one side of a team campus. I was given the opportunity to take two separate labs, the Uber lab and a research lab, and join them for a collaborative work environment. The entire lower level is dedicated to shops that mimic the surrounding area except for the lobby/entrance to the facility. The second floor is an outdoor private rooftop balcony podium level separating the public from the private areas. The collaboration areas are set in-between the labs to promote teamwork. The labs protrude out in order to connect to the surrounding area and give the opportunity to be an icon that people can see down the busy 9th avenue and want to engage.

Workforce housing will be housing for the 80% of the west side population that makes less than $20,000/yr.  The median age in the area is 31 and the existing housing square footage is 930.

Workforce housing needs to incorporate an affordable rent and mortgage, have affordable utilities that can include sustainability and correct orientation to the sun and winds.  This community incorporates “Shift” which helps having less parking by using shared vehicles.

A good neighborhood incorporates having outdoor space, private living spaces, and numerous other factors that support community integration. When incorporating these things into our site we came up with a design that incorporates all these things for comfortable workforce housing.

The housing has a total of 108 units on 5.4 acres with all the appropriate amenities.  It is built affordable with type 2 construction from mainly concrete. For extra shading or privacy, movable mesh is used on the balconies.  The units use solar hot water for extra sustainability.

Above the parking are sits the PV panels to provide energy to the site and shade for the automobiles.  The housing sits between housing and retail space and follows existing road patterns.

The questions I might ponder is how to make affordable design more aesthetic and how may I apply more sustainable strategies in a desert environment?

I am currently working on the latest affordable housing board and how I believe it could be laid out on 4.2 acres using the 19 dwelling units per acre theory.  The setbacks, parking areas, sidewalks, and road dimensions took up a lot more space than I planned and made the area for the units a lot more dense than expected.  The townhouses seem better aesthetically but the apartments seem more efficient for the space available.

Since my last post, I have visited The Linq many times and sometimes twice in one day. In our Community Integrated Resorts (CIR) research, I have the task of gathering the number of visitors that come within 20 minute increments and also the amount of visitors that enter businesses. I have gone to The Linq during the day and night and observed the demographics of age, ethnicity, and genders that visit. Our team has decided that we will focus on three main points that we believe could make a CIR successful which is the physical, programming, and sensory. I am focusing on the programming and how the data that I have gathered can be analyzed and useful in the CIR project. The question that I am looking at is how does design influence different age groups, genders, and ethnicity in Las Vegas and how it can be applied to the CIR project.