Designing Housing as Carbon Storage, 2024

This report summarizes the work by students and faculty in the graduate architecture studio “Homegrown – Designing Housing as Carbon Storage” in the Fall 2024 at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College of New York.

The studio and related seminar examined the complex relationship between a growing housing crisis in New York and the unprecedented challenge to rapidly transform the built environment from a major emitter of greenhouse gasses to a central solution to the climate crisis. The research explored landscapes, forests and farms in the American Northeast as sources for new bioregional construction methods.

The list of plants we studied are native to the American Northeast or can be viably grown in this region. From life cycles and research, we moved to a haptic learning, gathering material samples and products and constructing 1:1 wall assemblies to explore plants and materials with our hands and understand their properties and installation methods. Interspersed throughout the report are designs for multi-unit housing challenging students to think through the use of these materials in section and envision a scale of construction beyond the one-off single family home we encountered in precedent studies. Co-instructors: Kaja Kühl and Anoushae Eirabie