Abundant Housing LA announces winners of 2025 National Single Stair Architectural Design Competition

The Considerable Housing LA Training Fund, a California advocacy group, has introduced the winners of the 2025 Nationwide Single Stair Architectural Design Competitors.

The design competitors was meant to showcase revolutionary single-stair residential constructing design, a burgeoning housing typology in cities across the nation. Scholar Coby Lefkowitz, architect Gerhard Mayer, and design critic Frances Anderton juried the competitors.

Single-stair, multifamily residences have been authorized because the Seventies in Seattle, the place buildings as much as six tales want only one stairwell. Different cities like Austin, Baltimore, and Memphis are actually beginning to observe go well with with single-stair reforms.

This method permits for extra residences, higher pure air flow and daylighting, and faster and extra economical development, the American Planning Affiliation contends. It’s significantly advantageous for infill and small heaps zoned for single-family development, the place sq. footage is treasured.

Per the competitors guidelines there have been three undertaking award classes: Websites had been in Austin; San Francisco; and Portland, Oregon. First prize winners had been introduced in every metropolis. Single-stair development is right now authorized in Austin and Portland, however not San Francisco, the place reasonably priced housing advocates are actually pushing for single-stair reform.

David Baker Architects (DBA) gained first prize within the San Francisco class for its submission, Steplight. The undertaking is situated on an infill lot and is outlined from the outside by cascading balconies and terraces. Mayer the juror counseled the unit structure ideated by DBA for prioritizing “entry to pure daylight and cross-ventilation, and the unit combine presents a balanced vary of condominium sizes to accommodate numerous city households.”

The profitable crew in Austin was comprised of Christian Calle Figueroa and Alexis Schulma. Their undertaking, titled Cadavre Exquis, was sited in a low-rise residential neighborhood. It posits an answer for constructing a lot higher-density, naturally-ventilated, courtyard housing. In describing the undertaking’s deserves, Lefkowitz mentioned Cadavre Exquis is “equal components a pleasing imaginative and prescient for group and radical experimentation.”

“With rainwater assortment techniques, central gardens, brise soleil,” Lefkowitz added, “it asserts that buildings take a firmer function in shaping extra sustainable neighborhoods with out compromising on a very powerful mandate of this system: {that a} constructing be basically fascinating to dwell in by itself phrases with out yielding to the uncertainty of passionately felt aspiration.”

Internal Backyard by architect Norbert Schlotter took house first prize within the Portland class. That undertaking is a single-stair courtyard constructing outlined by thick pilasters and horizontal planes. The constructing is lacquered in powder pink and inexperienced paint, and is stacked like a vertical backyard, Schlotter mentioned within the design assertion.

“This undertaking had me on the pink and inexperienced, a shade mixture I really like. Along with the cylindrical and triangular columns and chunky delineation of the ground plates, the result’s a daring and unique facade,” Anderton mentioned in describing Internal Backyard. Anderton counseled the undertaking for its “Babylonian hanging greenery on the within courtroom, dripping from the one stair, remodel the circulation on the coronary heart of the idea into a pleasant secret backyard.”

Second and third place winners within the 2025 Nationwide Single Stair Architectural Design Competitors had been: James Donaldson, Sidell Pakravan Architects, Jonah Coe-Scharff, Kyle Barker and Mark Rukamathu, Story Dimson Studio, and Su In Kim and Seyun Kwon.