Community Design Center’s Housing, Greenhouse Project Wins 2023 Future House Award

GrowLofts, a project combining housing with a greenhouse, won a 2023 Future House Award from the Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum.

The project, which won in the category of Affordable, Social, and Community Living Housing, was developed by the U of A Community Design Center as typologically based research.

Future House Awards is a prestigious distinguished global residential awards program that honors new and cutting-edge design worldwide. An international jury composed of several distinguished designers worked remotely and selected 70 submissions from a shortlist as the “Best of the Best” in new residential design. This year’s award-winning projects are spread across 40 countries — from Uganda to Taiwan, from Miami to Egypt.

The U of A Community Design Center, directed by Steve Luoni since 2003, is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is also Distinguished Professor of architecture and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

“What if you put a house in a greenhouse, substituting a stacked garden for a yard?” Luoni asked. “GrowLofts is one of those futuring projects that achieves novel outcomes by solving for multiple challenges simultaneously. Such scenario thinking will become ever more important in advancing community resiliency — the capacity to adapt to volatile futures.”

The Tipping Point Challenges

The GrowLofts design shares food, energy and conviviality at its edges without sacrificing household autonomy. The project combines solutions to three structural challenges that will reach tipping points in the future: affordable housing, access to healthy food and renewable energy. This social housing structure sandwiches small urban lofts for short- and long-term stays between a shared “hyperporch” on the street edge and a shared greenhouse on the garden side.

The greenhouse is a four-season operation supporting a food forest and powered by a natural “climate battery.” The climate battery is a solar heat storage and air exchange between greenhouse air and its growing soil. Greenhouse soil stores excess heat and humidity pulled from greenhouse air through a network of underground perforated pipes and overhead fans. Roots, trunks and leaves benefit from the distributed moisture, drastically reducing the need for irrigation. During cool periods, warm air underground is drawn from pipes and circulated to heat the greenhouse air….