Courtyard Housing Competition

The City of Portland invites you to share your ideas on the design possibilities of housing oriented to shared courtyards. Portland is promoting courtyard housing as an additional infill housing type that can provide a quality living environment at densities higher than conventional detached housing.

We invite entrants to suggest compelling solutions to several key challenges:

• How can courtyard housing be designed to serve as an attractive option for families with children?

• How can courtyards serve as useable outdoor space while also providing environmental sustainability benefits, act as a setting for community interaction while also respecting privacy needs, or serve as a pedestrian-oriented space while also accommodating cars?

• How can courtyard housing avoid a purely inward focus and contribute to Portland’s tradition of street-oriented urbanism?

This competition is part of a multi-pronged effort by the City of Portland to retain families with children in the city’s neighborhoods in the face of increasingly unaffordable conventional detached housing. This competition will be a key opportunity to explore how courtyard housing may help fill the need for new housing for families with children, as well as provide desirable options for other types of households.

The City of Portland intends to facilitate the construction of winning designs by providing funding to adapt designs to building sites and encouraging developers to partner with winning designers in an anticipated design-build competition.

Competition Program Summary
The competition has two submission categories based on two types of infill site opportunities common in different parts of Portland:
1. Inner Portland Infill Site: 100′ wide by 100′ deep; Housing program: 4-10 units oriented to a shared courtyard with one parking space per unit.
2. Eastern Portland Infill Site: 95′-wide by 180′ deep; Housing program: 7-17 units oriented to a shared courtyard with one parking space per unit.

The courtyards may be pedestrian-only or mixed pedestrian/vehicular courtyards. Additional details are available in the Competition Brief.

Schedule
July 24: Competition Opens
October 24: Submittals Due
November 14: Award Notification
December 14: Award Reception

Awards / Publications / Exhibitions
The jury will review the eligible anonymous submissions and will offer up to $20,000 in awards. Award-winning designs will be published in a full-color monograph and displayed in a series of public exhibitions. The City of Portland intends to facilitate the construction of winning designs by providing funding to adapt designs to building sites and encouraging developers to partner with winning designers in an anticipated design-build competition.

Registration
Registration opens July 24, 2007. Upon registration and payment of a $45 entry fee, participants will be assigned a registration number and have access to the full competition brief.

Contact Information
For information on the competition, or if you have questions, please see send an email to info@courtyardhousing.org.

Further Information
http://www.courtyardhousing.org/