FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Everybody deserves good design. That premise prompted architecture professor Aaron Gabriel and design partner Kathy Chang to develop award-winning quarters for transitional homeless housing. A prototype was built in New York City last year and is featured in the new book, Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises.

“Physical environment matters,” Gabriel said, adding, “How can you expect people in a negative environment to feel safe and confident, especially when they are already on the margins of society?”

A prototype of the design was built and tested in an historic New York City lodging house. Ample shelving allows residents to personalize their dwelling unit, while the Dutch door fosters community.

Collections such as these inspired the housing scheme, which frames treasured objects.

Gabriel and Chang reworked the single-room occupancy (SRO) prototype, a once-popular housing option that offered a bed and a place to stow belongings for about $7 a day. The SRO fell into disfavor in the 60s and 70s due to changes in U.S. housing policy. Gabriel and Chang’s design for 19 interlocking cubicles engenders community with wide, well-lit halls and Dutch doors divided horizontally so that inhabitants may open the top half to neighborly interaction. These features foster social connections that curb crime and preserve the single-room occupancy lodging house as a low-cost, dignified alternative to the streets.

Gabriel and Chang’s design was one of five first-prize winners selected in The First Step Housing Design Competition, sponsored by Common Ground and the Architecture League of New York. A prototype of their design has been built and installed in the Andrews Hotel, a century-old lodging house in New York City's Bowery District, but not without changes guided by their lodging house clients. The translucent polycarbonate walls that lent a glowing, eerie beauty to the original design scheme were scrapped: “The gentlemen said 'absolutely not’; they want a lot of privacy,” Gabriel said.

Common Ground is refining the prototype and will install 95 units in 2007. The project has been published in Architecture magazine, New York Arts Magazine and the New York Times. In Design Like You Give a Damn, edited by Architecture for Humanity, the project is grouped with a number of architecture’s humanitarian heroes, including Auburn’s Rural Studio and Bryan Bell’s Design Corps. In a wide range of imaginative yet practical projects — think paper churches, inflated hemp houses, a hexagonal yurt — the simplicity of Gabriel and Chang’s project stands out. Each cubicle is about half the size of the average car and costs less than $5,000. The design accommodates basics such as a desk, chair and bed but goes several steps further by creating a customizable space with ample shelving for the personal arrangement of treasured possessions. “It’s an open vessel for your life, your things,” Gabriel said. “We’re not going to change their life or lifestyle, but we can make their environment better,” he added.

Gabriel and Chang’s design for housing the homeless may not change lives — but in fostering community it may save a few. Consider, for example, the 1995 heat wave in Chicago that killed 700 people, the majority of them aged and poor.

“There were no deaths in one well organized SRO,” Gabriel said. “People knew each other and watched out for each other, and a janitor went around knocking on doors. That happened because there was a more open social situation fostered in part by the facility’s design.”

Long days at the School of Architecture’s Community Design Center, where Gabriel recently was promoted to assistant director, leave scant time for do-good design work, but projects such as the design center’s multi-award-winning “green” neighborhood for the Benton County, Ark. chapter of Habitat for Humanity tie in to his interests.

“It’s what we do here at the design center — use design to enhance existing models,” Gabriel said, eager to return to work. A new project and construction coordination at the Habitat site filled the rest of his day.

Founded in 1995, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center has provided design and planning services to more than 30 communities across Arkansas. The center’s planning has helped Arkansas communities and organizations secure nearly $62 million in grant funding to enact suggested improvements. In addition to revitalizing historic downtowns, the center addresses new challenges in affordable housing, urban sprawl, environmental planning, and management of regional growth or decline. The design center also offers hands-on civic design experience to students who work under the direction of design professionals. UACDC has won 15 design and education awards since director Steve Luoni and Gabriel came on board in 2003. To learn more about Habitat Trails and other UACDC projects, visit their Web site at http://uacdc.uark.edu/.