The Brief: Affordable Housing That's Both Contextual and ‘Funky’

The corner of Germantown Avenue and Coulter Street in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood is currently occupied by a small parking lot behind a short row of shops on the campus of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. But through a nascent partnership between the church and the Northwest Community Land Trust, the site could someday be transformed into a mixed-use apartment building with affordable housing units serving neighborhood families.

Last fall, a group of fourth-year students in the undergraduate architecture program had a chance to run with that concept as part of a community design workshop called Germantown Housing Justice. The studio, led by Presidential Associate Professor of Architecture Rashida Ng at Weitzman and chair of the undergraduate architecture program, and co-taught by Brian Szymanik, principal of Studio 6mm and a lecturer at Weitzman, directed students to “consider opportunities to redress historic racial inequities in housing while promoting resilience, supporting climate adaptation, and fostering healthy communities.”

“It was really about testing the density of the site through various urban design proposals, and then considering what makes a community and what makes a home.”

The seed of the studio was planted when Ng was contacted by John Elliott Churchville, who founded the Northwest CLT in 2021 along with Rev. David Morris, the rector at St. Luke’s. Like other community land trusts, the Northwest CLT is designed to acquire property and sell or lease it to lower-income families in the neighborhood, with the goal of keeping housing permanently affordable. While the site on St. Luke’s campus isn’t ready to be developed just yet, Churchville thought a visioning exercise could help build some momentum for the CLT’s work. A developer and student himself—Churchville is enrolled in Thomas Jefferson University’s MS in Real Estate Development program—he also wanted to give students free reign to explore their own style. 

“I wanted the students to be able to do what they wanted to do, take advantage of the space, and be bold enough to think about their own ideas,” Churchville says.

The partnership between Weitzman and the CLT actually began before the semester started. Last summer, Anastasia Osorio, a PennPraxis fellow and graduate student in City and Regional Planning spent several months researching Germantown demographics to build data that the CLT could use to support its work. In August, the undergraduate architecture program and the CLT signed a memorandum of understanding outlining a few responsibilities for each. As part of the MOU, the school promised to provide “three to six hypothetical design proposals for multifamily housing and mixed-use development on the site.” Students spent the fall semester creating those proposals.

“When we got to the studio, it was really about testing the density of the site through various urban design proposals, and then considering what makes a community and what makes a home,” Ng says.

The studio built on early discussions of race, housing segregation, and faith and community to build the foundations for a potential project at the site. Students also analyzed local building types to inform their designs. They visited the site and met with the Northwest CLT several times during the semester. At a final presentation at St. Luke’s in December, student teams displayed design proposals which incorporated differing amounts of housing units and commercial space, taking inspiration from local churches, warehouses, and rowhouses. Rather than replicate historical forms, students transformed them into contemporary building elements that feel familiar, yet contemporary. From adorned brick facades and muraled sidewalks in one project to an annular courtyard building in another, all teams said they’d tried to honor Churchville’s edict to “Make it funky.”

After an initial site visit, each student made a collage, and Ng split them into teams based on various affinities in their work. For seniors Leean Li, Natalie Kung, and Sarah Borders, the main design inspiration was Germantown’s brick rowhomes. Their proposal, the Elevated Urban Village, included 36 housing units with four commercial spaces on the ground floor. The team said they appreciated the freedom to make design choices without having to hew too closely to a constrained budget.

“It has to be structurally sound. It can’t be over the top. And obviously you have to be realistic,” Kung says. “But we weren’t constrained by, like, we can’t use this material because it’s too expensive.”

All the teams had “an intuition about what was appropriate” at the site even without strict guidelines from the CLT, Ng says.

“They were given an opportunity to be selfish in a community engagement studio, and they didn’t lean into that instinct or that opportunity,” she says. “Instead, they really had a process that was informed by the history, by what’s here, and by our understanding of the neighborhood.”

The partnership will continue. Ng will continue her partnership with the CLT this spring as they evaluate the feasibility of the four proposals that students created in the fall. For Churchville, the student designs were an inspiring exercise in thinking through the possibilities at the site.

“I’m impressed with every single project,” he says. “It’s funky, it’s out of the box, but it takes advantage of their doing their homework.”

 The next step is to put those ideas to the test.

“We do want to see a real project come out of this,” he says.

Students enrolled in Ng and Szymanik's studio included Jerod Bayly, Sarah Borders, Jason Cornelison, Jane Dwares, Rhys Floyd, Mars Gu, Jackson Hamilton, Favor Idika, Natalie Kung, Leean Li, Jessica Lin, June Lin, and Rebecca Spratt.