Modern Architecture at its Finest; or Designs to Inspire Vancouver!

[Migrant_Coconut]

Good idea, or nah?

The Single-Staircase Radicals Have a Good Point

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The Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason has a number of complaints about the way America makes its apartment buildings. The components are inferior, he says: The best sliding doors and windows are made elsewhere. The designs rarely accommodate larger families. And there are too many staircases.

Too many what now? Eliason is the founder of Larch Lab and the lead evangelist of a small group of architects and developers intrigued by the possibilities of making multifamily buildings with only one stairway. And conversely, fed up with the North American standards that require most apartments to be accessible by two of them...

... Eliason observes that when you require every apartment to connect to two staircases, you all but ensure those units are built around one long double-loaded corridor, to give all residents access to both stairways. You tilt the scales in favor of larger floor plates in bigger buildings, because developers need to find room for two stairways, and connect them—and then compensate for the unsellable interior space consumed by the corridor.

The designs that result, Eliason argues, are more likely than not to offer smaller, cookie-cutter units constrained by their position along the long hallway. Apartments must look either north or south. Sunlight or shade. Sunrise or sunset. Busy street or quiet back yard. And no one, save perhaps a lucky occupant of a corner unit, gets a cross-breeze.

Cut out one of those staircases, and you can cut out the corridor, too. Narrower sites are suddenly in play. Construction costs go down. The ratio of “rentable” space in a building goes up, which makes development cheaper. That in turn can translate into lower rents or more flexible designs. Two or three units a floor is suddenly more economical, which makes the stairway a more intimate, closely shared space. Family-size units. Units where the living room faces south to the sun and the street and the bedrooms face north to the quiet shade. “In the architecture world it’s hammered in from the beginning that we need two exits from every space,” Eliason said. “But in most other countries, that second means of egress is the fire brigade.”