A Teacher’s Housing Cooperative
Denver Single-Stair Housing Challenge
Lincoln Ruiz-Truong & Nick Grosh
Janurary 2025
Hosted by Buildner and SAR+ Architects, the project aims to address the housing crisis in Colorado by exploring ways in which interventions to existing building codes can result in new single- stair mid-rise apartment buildings.
Participation / Financing
Our architectural design emerges from two factors. First, a need to affordably house public school teachers, especially in close proximity to schools. Second, the opportunity provided by point access building typology, affording a density within a small footprint. In this proposal we not only design the physical systems, a flexible concept of support and infill aimed to last centuries not decades, but we also structure the social and financial systems which engage the physical. Within a system of rigid supports and flexible infill, we as architects facilitate co-design workshops with the residents, tailoring room layouvts to individual needs within a predefined ruleset. This process reimagines housing as a tool for city design, embedding principles of sustainability and community into the built environment. The building process becomes a collaborative act, where architecture is shaped by the lived realities of its inhabitants.
We imagine the land, owned by the local school district, leased out for 99 years to a cooperative which consists mainly of teachers and a few members of the surrounding community. The cooperative then funds, through collective mortgages, the construction of the building. As the cooperative matures, the structure allows residents to switch units as occupants come and go. As a result of its non-speculative and non-profit nature it becomes more affordable as time goes on as the debt is paid off. And as a result of the flexible design built with care, repair, and social safety in mind, we propose a framework for permanently affordable housing.