Housing at Markham Square

Authors

Community Design Center

Files

Abstract

A former scrap metal yard located four blocks north of Conway’s main commercial street was re-imagined as a new square surrounded by a mixed-use residential district. The new square features “wilded” landscapes for stormwater runoff management and flood control. Proposed multifamily housing with distinct frontages— two-story screened porches, balconies, terraces, patios, and courtyards—will line the edge of “green” streets incorporating stormwater treatment landscapes.

Description

Housing is an issue of territory as much as it is of building. A downtown regeneration proposal for an industrial brownfields site, the Markham Square Housing District is a housing-first approach beginning with the concept of a “living transect” that connects square and shared street to building frontage, shared housing court and patio, and interior space—all articulated as a series of rooms. This invokes Christopher Alexander’s pattern language to design the front edge of the building as a place. Building frontages create a “fuzzy urbanism”. Thick building edges accommodate a variety of social activities through urban building frontage (porches, balconies, decks, stoops, and terraces); liminal spaces not specific to one housing type. Besides correcting for ecological dysfunction, the housing district is a mixed-income neighborhood with construction costs between $110-180/sf to answer local racial and income segregation. The formula of Frontage + Type creates “prospect and refuge”, a spatial formula that adds value to both housing and public sector investments.

The two primary place types around which housing is clustered include an extroverted residential square and an introverted hillocks, both providing landscapes for ecological and social repair. The new square and surrounding street network feature “wilded” landscapes for ecologically-based stormwater runoff management in a downtown prone to flooding. All housing is affordable walk-up residential multifamily typologies—rowhouses, bungalows, triplexes, courtyard housing, and townhouses—that have not been built since the hegemony of suburban policy in the 1950s—what is called missing middle housing. Compatible with single-family housing, these affordable types (between 900 and 2,100 sf) are key to revitalizing small and mid-sized downtowns without the population dislocations accompanying gentrification. The goal is to incent living downtown by structuring an imageable mixed-income neighborhood for a downtown that lacks a tradition of multifamily housing.

Publication Date

6-2020

Document Type

Report

City

Conway, AR

Keywords

affordable housing; urban planning; missing middle housing; scenario planning; low impact development; smart growth

Disciplines

Architectural Engineering | Environmental Design | Landscape Architecture | Urban, Community and Regional Planning | Urban Studies and Planning

Awards

2023 Block, Street & Building Design Competition: Winner
2022 Architizer A+ Awards Special Mention: Unbuilt Multi-Unit Housing
2022 ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award
2021 AN Best of Design Awards Editors’ Pick Unbuilt Urban Design
2021 American Architecture Award
2021 The Plan Awards: Housing Future Winner

Comments

Project Team:

University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design:
Stephen Luoni, Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies, Director
Claude M. Terral III, AIA, Project Architect
Adriana Ramos-Hinojos, Project Designer
Tarun Kumar Potluri, Assoc.AIA, Project Designer
Kacper Lastowiecki, Project Designer
Isabelle Troutman, Student Intern
Jala Jones, Student Intern
Linda Komlos, Administrative Analyst

Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design:
Peter MacKeith, Dean and Professor
John Folan, Dept of Architecture Head and Professor

Architecture Students:
Molly Dillard
Bryan Murren
Mitchell Pickering
Urbano Soto
Bethany Stanford
Dayton Thurn
Garrison Weaver

Landscape Architects, Civil/Ecological Engineers:
Ecological Design Group, Inc.

Water Resources/Environmental Consultants:
FTN Associates, Ltd.

City of Conway, Arkansas:
Bart Castleberry, Mayor
Finley Vinson, Director, Transportation and City Engineer
Phillip J. Vick, P.E., Civil Engineer
James Walden, Director, Planning & Development
Levi Hill, Assistant Director, Planning & Development
Marsha Guffey, Grants Administrator

City Planning Consultant:
Scott Grummer (formerly with the City of Conway)

Lake Conway Point Remove Watershed Alliance

Pine Street Area Community Development Corporation

Sponsor:
National Endowment for the Arts

Citation

Community Design Center. (2020). Housing at Markham Square. Project Reports. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cdcpr/10