The Moda Apartments ... roommates not required.

Few topics are as visceral. A 300 square foot apartment is an affront, and 200 square feet is downright inhuman…right?

Not to me. They fill an important and underserved need. And for a lot of people they’ll be a good and even fun way to live.

With the Videre opening up on 23rd soon, and with the Moda Apartments recently opening in Belltown (originally sold as condos), small apartments are a hot subject in more ways than one. There’s something about the very idea that compels many people to speak as if they’re being asked to live there personally.

Maybe those people think no housing is better than small housing. Or that the only legit route to affordability is to live farther out (as if that math makes sense), or to have roommates (there’s a way to maintain sanity!), or to live with Mom and Dad, or to live with a subsidy, or to live with the pitter-patter of rats, as a friend of mine once did.

You might think this is all theory to me, but I’ve lived it, and recently. Spent four months in a hotel room on Lower Queen Anne while between condos in 2008. Probably 250 square feet. Stuff away in a storage locker. The only thing roomy was the ADA-compliant bathroom. Living in the middle of things made it much easier…sort of like Moda, and even Videre for some people.

Costs can be high on a square foot basis, for example because plumbing costs don’t scale down with the size of the bathroom, the electrical load for each unit might be nearly as high, and elevator service is related to the number of units more than square footage. With shell costs automatically high, developers can be excused for spending a little bit extra to put in finishes that bring the perceived value up to the prices they need to justify.

About “fun.” We’re all wired a little differently. Some people think fun is living in 3,000 square feet and stretching out, with the whole family having a different room for each thing they do, and spending a lot of time fussing with the lawn, and having lots and lots of furniture, and, well, why on earth do people assume we all want that? Maybe fun is living within one’s means in a cozy place, knowing where everything is, and having freedom from stuff. Maybe fun is using that money to eat better, travel more, or have a financial cushion. Maybe it’s trading square footage for a location in the middle of it all. Yes, it’s possible to live small as a lifestyle choice.

Some people want fun, while others just want to live affordably and without subsidy in a clean place without roommates of the various kinds. Nothing wrong with that. Let those subsidies (such as the levy we should renew this year) go to more needy people. And it’s great when people choose to live near work or school, rather than taxing the transportation system.

Apparently the Videre project was fit into the zoning through creative use of the code, and wasn’t specifically envisioned. Rather than scurry around to fix this “loophole,” we should find ways to help more of these projects happen.

Seattle’s own Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects has made national magazine Fast Company’s list of the Top 10 most innovative architecture firms in the world.

Bird's Nest

OSKA is in pretty good company on the list, which gives the No. 1 slot to international giant Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Second slot goes to Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, designer of the Beijing Olympics’ Birds Nest. The third firm listed is Zaha Hadid Architects, designer of London’s Millennium dome and that ET-inspired (or is that just me?) Chanel pavillion in Central Park last fall.

The list also includes a lot of global designers who’ve done projects in our own backyard. Rem Koolhaas’s OMA is fourth on the list. The Dutch designer’s recent projects include the CCTV building in Beijing and our own Seattle Central Library.

Holl's St. Ignatius

Steven Holl, designer of Beijing’s “Linked Hybrid” complex and Seattle University’s Chapel of St. Ignatius, was fifth on the list. London’s Foster + Partners, designer of the new Beijing airport terminal, and, possibly, of the pending Civic Plaza for Seattle officials, was No. 6. (That project was supposed to leverage a public-private partnership to get a new skyscraper with public amenities across the street from City Hall, but it’s currently a hostage to the downturn.)

Spot No. 7 goes to Italy’s Renzo Piano, which recently designed the new NY Times headquarters building. Then comes Christian de Portzamparc, the French architect who designed the Luxembourg Philharmonic’s concert hall and has some cool visions for the future of Paris. Spot No. 9 went to KieranTimberlake, who designed the Cellophane House for MOMA’s show last year on modular marvels.

Montecito Residence- by Jim Bartsch

OSKA was tenth on the list. The magazine noted the firm’s “dossier of important public buildings” (Seattle Public Library’s Southwest branch, Frye Art Museum) and “skillful hand with residences framing sublime natural vistas.” OSKA has won numerous local awards in the latter category over the past few years (see Delta Shelter, Montecito Residence, Rolling Huts, Outpost, just to name a few).

This year, the firm was awarded AIA National’s firm of the year award. In the AIA Seattle awards last November, OSKA won an Award of Merit for its design of the Noah’s Ark for LA’s Skirball Cultural Center.

In Olympia, legislators are patting themselves on the back after closing a $9 billion budget gap. But it’s likely that they have only deferred addressing some of the fundamental structural problems with the state’s finances for another 2 years.

Legislators also took a victory lap after “solving” the viaduct problem by creating a mechanism by which Seattle taxpayers would have to pay for cost overruns on what would be a state project—after Seattle voted down the tunnel option. But that’s a different post.

Two big ideas that didn’t make it out of the regular session had to do with the always unpopular and hard to understand subjects of debt and taxes. The state will eventually have to figure out how to make its tax system fairer and less regressive. An income tax of some kind could be part of that, but that ideal didn’t get far this year.

The other really interesting concept was offered by Rep. Hans Dunshee. His proposal would have authorized the state to borrow $3 billion to retrofit public schools. The bill was missing a lot of critical details, but underlying was a great concept that I called Green Increment Financing.

Like Tax Increment Financing, Dunshee’s bill would have allowed the state to make upgrades and improvements to infrastructure that would pay for the financing of the debt. In the case of Green Increment Financing, the money to pay back the debt would come from accumulated savings as previously inefficient buildings began to realize energy savings. The retrofitting would create new jobs, and reductions in energy use would also reduce green house gas emissions.

Like Tax Increment Financing, the hurdle with this kind of idea is two-fold. First, and probably most difficult, is the terminology which includes words like “tax,” “bonds,” “financing,” “public indebtedness,” and “increment.” Even if legislators understand this concept, debt and taxes are political dynamite.

The second problem has to do with math and forecasting. Will energy improvements actually save enough to pay back the bonds? Savings can be estimated and this kind of financing on projected savings is done locally already. So these numbers can be figured out. But getting the numbers will take time

Hopefully, Green Increment Financing will gain ground between now and the next legislative session along with a more fundamental look at how we generate revenue for public benefits.

Two regional projects by local architects got ink today:

• GreenMuze has an article on Vancouver’s Convention Centre (note the spelling if you don’t already know which Vancouver I’m talking about), designed by Seattle’s LMN Architects.  The design includes Canada’s largest green roof and a water treatment system that includes blackwater treatment and a seawater heat pump systemthat provides heating and cooling.

• The Idaho Mountain Express has a story on community support for Callison’s proposed design for Bald Mountain Lodge in Ketchum.  Apparently, the Sun Valley community actually liking a proposed luxury hotel project is pretty rare. The 85-unit, five-story hotel is for Rock Resorts, a subsidiary of Vail Resorts.

I also got a press release today from local architect HyBrid. They’re having a project release party Friday at their newest project, Remington Court.

The four-townhouse infill project has a gas-fired instantaneous hydronic system, providing both hot water and floor coil heating. They are designed for stack and cross ventilation.

The party is open to the A and E community (and friends) and runs from 5 p.m. to midnight at 1320 E. Remington Court (one block south of 14th and Jefferson). Local art will be on display and food and drinks are promised.

"Library Side East" by Stephen L. Rosen

Rem Koolhaas, who designed the Seattle Central Public Library, and more recently the CCTV Building in Beijing, told the Wall Street Journal that money is scarce for megaprojects, even for him.

“I don’t even know about the word ‘downturn,’ ” Koolhaas told the WSJ in his office in Rotterdam. “It seems simply the end to a period.”

Though his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, hasn’t had any projects canceled yet, Koolhaas said they have several projects on hold.

And they’ve had to make layoffs. WSJ reported that the firm, which had 270 employees last summer, is now down to 220. OMA is working on a theater complex in Taipei, a library in Qatar and new buildings in Holland, WSJ reports.

Has your firm had layoffs too? Respond to the poll on the right (scroll down just a tad) on area layoffs at A/E/C firms.

SvR won last year's Golden Helmet award

It’s time for the third annual A/E bike to work challenge. The challenge, which mirrors the Cascade Bicycle Club’s Bike-to-Work Month Commute Challenge, pushes employees of Seattle-area architecture and engineering firms to compete for the most miles ridden by firm and by individual. It starts May 1.

Last year, 22 firms with a total of 368 riders participated, riding 43,075 miles. Mithun rode the most miles: 6,096.

The firm with the highest percentage of riders was SD Architects, with three out of four employees riding to work in May of 2008. SvR Design won the “Golden Helmet,” the competition’s unique award that calculates the overall miles ridden, factoring in the percentage of possible firm riders who rode and the percentage of possible commute trips ridden

The top rider in the challenge was Igor Rozanski of Notkin Mechanical Engineers, who rode 1,018 miles commuting from South Everett to Seattle. Other top riders included Chris Robertson of Shannon & Wilson at 855 miles, and Joe Llona, formerly of TetraTech, at 769 miles.

A/E firms interested in participating in the 2009 contest should contact SvR’s Maika Nicholson or Tony Dollar at (206) 223-0326.

Former Seattle City council member and architect Peter Steinbrueck just announced in a press release that he will spend a year in Cambridge as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design beginning in September.

Steinbrueck will research U.S. urban policy and global environmental challenges. The Loeb Fellowship, founded in 1970, provides a year of independent study at Harvard for outstanding mid-career professionals in fields related to the built and natural environment.

I guess that answers the question of if he’s running for mayor. . .

Earlier this year John Fox, leader of the Displacement Coalition, organized against House Bill 1490 titled “reducing greenhouse gas emissions through land use and transportation requirements.”

Fox took issue with many parts of the bill, including the claim that it would wipe out existing affordable housing and replace it with out-of-scale condo developments for the rich. Fox and supporters of the bill argued over whether the bill would really reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are hundreds if not thousands of low income and minority households all along the transit route whose homes would be turned into rubble,” he said. “What’s green about tossing that into a landfill and pouring tons of concrete for all the new high density development?”

The fight was over how to quantify whether the high density development proposed in the legislation would cut green house gas emissions or if the demolition and construction would actually increase emissions. Fox argued, without substantiation, that the bill would actually make things worse. Advocates were caught somewhat off guard. But a recent study sheds some light on the debate (although the bill is dead).

The authors of the study, published in The Journal of Urban Planning and Development, quantified the emissions from building materials and construction, home heating and power demands, and transportation energy, in both urban and suburban neighborhoods in the Toronto metro area.

They found that downtown residents use radically less energy, and consequently emit about two-thirds less climate-warming CO2 than their suburban counterparts.

While the study has its limits — it compares just two neighborhoods in a single city– it points, as other studies do, to the evidence that sprawl and car dependence are closely linked, and are responsible for a disproportionate share of GHG emissions.

This study or dozens like it probably won’t persuade John Fox. But it is an early indicator that indeed high-density development really does produce fewer green house gas emissions than low-density sprawl.

Read more about the study at the Sightline Daily Score Blog.

Build LLC's new office

No, I didn’t forget any zeroes.

Build LLC, a four person design-build firm, recently remodeled its Seattle office for $5,095. The project took six weeks and the firm’s own members did the work.

The remodel also included some interesting reclaimed materials, scrap wood and some salvage finds from Boeing Surplus (RIP).

Check out the details, including video and a materials list, on Build’s blog.

Carolyn Geise of Geise Architects is one of the women featured

The Seattle Chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ Diversity Roundtable, in partnership with the Association for Women in Architecture, is holding a celebration and program honoring women in the field of architecture tonight at the UW.

The free event is open to all within the architectural community and will highlight the work of Seattle women architects on nearly 60 projects from about 35 different firms. It runs from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. tonight at the UW’s College of Built Environments at Gould Hall at 3949 15th Ave. N.E. No reservations are required.

The program will also honor Jan Gleason, who recently retired from her role as executive director of Environmental Works. Gleason will speak at the informal gathering, which will include work by women architects on display and representatives from government agencies interested in helping women and minority-owned businesses succeed.

Work from architectural professionals from all over the region will be included in a presentation made at the program.  Participating firms include:  4D Architects, Arellano - Christofides Architects, atelierjones, Bassetti Architects, Belt Collins, Boxwood, Christina Pizana, CLARK DESIGN GROUP, DKA, DLR Group, Dr. Sharon E. Sutton, FAIA, FORTE ARCHITECTS, Geise Architects, Hewitt, Hutteball & Oremus, Irwin-Pancake Architects, Johnston Architects, Julie Kreig Architect, Kennan-Meyer Architecture, MAGELLAN ARCHITECTS, Mahlum, McNELIS ARCHITECTS, Mulvanny G2, NBBJ, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen, PATANO+HAFERMANN, Perkins + Will, Rolluda Architects, Schacht|Aslani Architects, schemata workshop, VIA ARCHITECTURE, and ZDS Architects.