U of A Community Design Center Projects Win National and International Awards
The Adult Family Home Prototype, shown here, is one of five projects by the U of A Community Design Center to recently garner awards in five national and international award programs.
Projects by the U of A Community Design Center have won awards in several competitions. The recognized projects explore diverse housing, food security and expansive site plans.
Five projects garnered awards in five national and international award programs, with 12 recognitions in all. The projects and respective competitions are:
- Adult Family Home Prototype (Future House Awards, AN Best of Design Awards [honorable mention])
- A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village (The American Architecture Awards)
- Foodscapes: Urban Agricultural Plan for the Fayetteville Public Library (A+Awards [finalist], The American Architecture Awards, Green Good Design Awards, AN Best of Design Awards [honorable mention])
- GrowLofts (Green Good Design Awards, A+Awards, The American Architecture Awards, AN Best of Design Awards)
- Rural Pocket Neighborhood: Affordable Housing in Sheridan, Arkansas (The American Architecture Awards)
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 and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.
Also, the UACDC was recognized by Architizer's A+List: The 220 Best Architecture and Design Firms Worldwide in 2024.
"We are pleased that our design work in food systems, housing and community planning continue to receive widespread recognition," Luoni said. "Our hope is that it gives our project sponsors and stakeholders the incentive to move the projects forward."
More about the projects
Adult Family Home Prototype
The Adult Family Home (AFH) Prototype is an emerging congregate housing solution for adults requiring non-medical assistance with the activities of daily living. More than 50 percent of seniors in nursing homes are there due to social deficits (e.g., isolation, outdated housing stock, lack of family or friends for support) rather than medical needs. Likewise, neurodivergent and physically disabled populations can live in AFHs, where on-site operators provide light care in support of semi-independent lifestyles.
The one-story courtyard prototype is prefabricated off-site from cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, a low-carbon construction technology. The central courtyard ensures a biophilic (love of life) design where occupants experience a fundamental connection to nature regardless of context. The courtyard also ensures that the building volume is one-room deep for optimizing cross ventilation and natural light.
As an alternative to costly medical-based housing, this prototype offers a financeable housing product for small operators who lack the capital associated with AFH design and development. Planning for the Adult Family Home Prototype is sponsored by Weyerhaeuser's 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions program, which focuses on three areas in which the program can make a meaningful difference by 2030: climate solutions, sustainable homes and rural communities.
A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village
A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village works to direct the growth in population, housing and tourism to areas that amplify the village's nature, ecosystems, sense of place and heritage. Countering the homogeneity of the 1950s-era modern layout, community stakeholders envisioned places with diverse housing types and ownership models that support plural lifestyles.
Three principles guide the plan: adaptability to changing futures, diversifying lifestyle and hospitality environments, and resiliency to market uncertainty. The plan formulates a market-responsive planning vocabulary through the articulation of a set of archetypal places to an otherwise automobile-oriented suburban environment with very low housing density. Modulated place types — dense town centers, village clusters, village highway development, rural festival and recreation spaces, greenways and communal neighborhood formats — address multiple market demands for inclusive living environments distinct from the single-family lot and home around which Cherokee Village was designed.
Foodscapes: Urban Agricultural Plan for Fayetteville Public Library
Foodscapes: Urban Agricultural Plan for the Fayetteville Public Library is a conceptual plan to introduce urban food gardens on the Fayetteville Public Library campus. The plan includes activities such as growing, processing, production, distribution, waste recovery and community education, curated in unique urban formats.
Foodscapes features a permaculture pattern language replicating the organic growing patterns and ecosystem structure found in nature. Growing will be curated across novel urban micro-environments that promote discovery. These areas include small-plot organic teaching gardens, a temperate food forest, terraced orchards for foraging, a four-season greenhouse with a climate battery and vernacular growing technologies in espaliers and thermal wall gardens. A food hub for residents doubles as an event space, a seed bank and a place for informal gatherings.
Planning for this project was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service.
GrowLofts
GrowLofts, a project combining housing with a greenhouse, 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. Heat can also be exchanged with the lofts, which are directly open to the greenhouse.
Rural Pocket Neighborhood: Affordable Housing in Sheridan, Arkansas
This pocket neighborhood for a rural timber production community in central Arkansas triangulates three concepts: addressing local construction market failures through prefabricated off-site construction with high energy efficiencies, creating housing affordability and building a sense of place that promotes sociability. The pocket neighborhood is a new real estate product for middle America. The concept substitutes front yards and car parking in garages at the front of the house for shared neighborhood greens. Additionally, pocket neighborhood planning introduces a shared street with rain gardens and bioswales in the space of the street and alley. The street reduces the need for costly underground drainage, which accounts for 40 percent of street costs in the southeast. Prefabricated housing construction incorporates SIPs (structural insulated panels) technology, a building system that uses rigid foam insulation sandwiched between two structural facings to create high-performance panels for walls, floors and roofs.
Planning for this project was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service.
More about the awards programs
Future House Awards
The Future House Awards, sponsored by Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, are a global residential awards program. The awards honor new and cutting-edge designs worldwide and promote international architecture and design.
Future House International Residential Awards arise from the convergence of residential design and architectural vision to champion and honor novel and inventive residential projects on a worldwide level. The awards program seeks to define the best and most innovative cutting-edge designs for residential architecture.
Green Good Design Awards
The Green edition of Good Design, sponsored by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, represents new international products, buildings, construction and planning projects that are leading the way globally to sustainable and compatible design. Throughout the more than 70 years of the award, the Good Design award has been given to everything from a NASA spaceship to a paper clip.
A+Awards
The A+Awards is an international design awards program in architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture and interior architecture. For over a decade, Architizer's A+Awards have been championing architectural excellence across the globe.
There are more than 100 award categories for every architectural typology, design concept and firm type, offering a wide range of opportunities for success. Categories include residential, commercial, cultural and institutional architecture; interiors, landscape architecture and infrastructure; dedicated categories for conceptual, unbuilt projects; Best Firm Awards for outstanding practice; and A+Sustainability Awards for sustainable design.
The American Architecture Awards
The American Architecture Awards, sponsored by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, are the nation's highest public awards given by a non-commercial, non-trade affiliated, public arts, culture and educational institution.
Now celebrating its 29th year, The American Architectural Awards are the nation's highest and most prestigious distinguished building awards program that honors new and cutting-edge design in the United States.
AN Best of Design Awards
The AN Best of Design Awards, sponsored by The Architect's Newspaper, is a premiere North American awards program open to design professionals for interiors, buildings, landscape, urbanism and installations in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
In its 11th year, the AN Best of Design Awards received the highest number of entries, with most concerning single-family homes. This year, there were 37 winning projects from around the world.
Contacts
Tara Ferkel, communications specialist
Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design
479-575-4704,
tferkel@uark.edu
Michelle Parks, director of communications
Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design
479-575-4704,
mparks17@uark.edu