The Hillclimb
Intro
The Hillclimb is our shortlisted entry to the Denver Single-Stair Housing design competition. The international competition challenged architects, urban designers, and policymakers to rethink the Point Access Block—a common mid-rise housing typology found in cities worldwide.
In urban areas, housing affordability continues to be challenged by high land and construction costs, a difficult lending environment, and building code limitations that make compact apartment typologies infeasible. This is directly responsible for continued sprawl, vehicle dependence, and a decline of community as developers turn their attention to areas outside of existing urban areas. The efficiency and scale of Single Stair Housing provides an opportunity to counter these challenges. It also provides an opportunity to reimagine the form and purpose of the interior stairway.
Today, the purpose of stairways in housing projects are generally limited to a component within the means of egress; a simple switch back stairway within a vertical enclosure that is reserved for emergencies or inhabitants that don’t like to take an elevator.
Hillclimb seeks to uncoil the simple utility of the exit stairway and transform it into a multistory path that spatially connects every inhabitant into a vertically integrated community.
This spatial integration presents a new way of living that enhances interactions between individuals, fosters communities that are resilient and supportive, creates ties to the environment, and generates varied experiences as individuals traverse a geomorphic space with ties to both the natural world and classic hill town spaces.
stacked uncoil stretched
low use extend journey high use
isolate stories visually continuous full spatial integration
visually discontinuous varied experiences
single experience community identity
Household Organization
Three key elements are utilized to organize the households within the project.
The spine occupies the territory of the stair—beneath and above—and creates a linear organization of prefabricated modules dedicated to elements of domestic life, like arrival, storage, study, craft, and cooking.
The stacks are vertical chases that efficiently organize wet walls and other services across a wide diversity of dwelling types. Bathrooms attached to the stacks flip east or west, as needed, to facilitate comfortably sized private and shared spaces. The elevator is a stack as well. Double-sided, it provides a direct vertical connection through the project while allowing the enclosed lobby to flip sides to maximize project efficiency.
The sticks are non-loadbearing partitions that, like a filmstrip, differentiate spaces across the length of the household. The sticks afford an adaptability and flexibility of space configuration and allow units of varying length and entry location to offer a broad range of housing solutions to the community.
