Team: Amir Lahouti, Brianna Westbrook
Instructors: Laura Marie Peterson, Jonathan Rule
Year: 2024
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Category: Studio (Collectives)
Life is fluid. Our living situations evolve with friends, family, jobs, and relationships. Yet, traditional affordable housing often lacks the flexibility to accommodate these changes, forcing relocation when family sizes shift and disrupting lives, jobs, and social networks.
Extant offers an adaptable housing solution designed to evolve with its residents. This framework allows units to expand, contract, merge, or divide, enabling long-term adaptability without displacing community members. By empowering residents to adjust their living spaces over time, Extant addresses the imbalance of underutilized and overcrowded spaces, ensuring housing remains responsive to demographic shifts, economic fluctuations, and changing lifestyles.
This project specifically examines the limitations of housing flexibility within the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust (BVCLT). Through interviews with residents and managers, our research revealed a lack of adaptability in accommodating diverse family structures, limiting the community’s inclusivity and ability to serve a broader range of residents.
Thanks to BVCLT’s zoning exceptions, we maximized land use by minimizing on-site parking, instead prioritizing bike parking and dedicating space for an existing community bike shop. The project explores design solutions that enhance housing flexibility, fostering greater equity and inclusivity within the BVCLT and beyond.
By ensuring that housing can grow and shift with its inhabitants, Extant redefines stability—not as stagnation, but as the ability to adapt.