Empowered Living Design Competition

Salt Lake City wanted to see what ideas its design-minded residents had for affordable, sustainable, accessible housing. Together with the American Institute of Architects Utah Chapter and the Community Development Corporation of Utah, Salt Lake City launched the Empowered Living Design Competition, inviting designers, architects and others to submit their designs for small residences that could help address the City’s affordable housing shortage.

“There is no easy fix that will solve homelessness and housing insecurity. It’s going to require a multi-faceted approach and a lot of innovation and creativity,” Mayor Erin Mendenhall said. “The design concepts generated by this competition have the potential to help fill a gap in our housing stock. These small, unique properties could be life-changing for those who inhabit them.”

Participants were invited to submit a design for a standalone home or cluster of small cottages — also known as tiny homes — in a planned development, or an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on a lot with a primary residence. Entries were judged based on five criteria: affordability, accessibility, sustainability, durability, and livability.  More than 80 entries were submitted from individuals and firms around the world.

Below are the winners from this competition:

ADU Grand Award

Birch 1 - Woofter Bolch Architecture

Birch is an innovative, affordable Accessory Dwelling Unit that is adaptable to any site but is tailored to take advantage of the rear lot access of residential alley sites within Salt Lake City. It maximizes the potential for new types of urban living within these traditionally underutilized backyard spaces, creating density and an affordable housing option within existing neighborhoods while maintaining the existing housing stock and character of the street frontages.  The design of the birch ADU is affordable, durable, sustainable, and accessible, all in the service of enhancing and supporting flexible, long-term livability for its occupants. To address the potential of various sites, our proposed design is a limited “kit-of-parts” including a structure for living, an exterior storage shed, and a covered outdoor space in-between. This covered space, the “birch” (BI-directional poRCH), forms the heart of the design by creating a flexible covered outdoor space that extends the living space and is both sheltered and connected. When thoughtfully sited and configured to the unique characteristics of its site, the “kit-of-parts” can adapt to and engage its specific context, both built and natural, and work to create community inside and out.

ADU Runner-up

Vested - Process Studio PLLC

You’d like to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in your backyard. You go online and find an ADU design that will fit nicely in your backyard. It has big windows for views to the mountains, a generous porch, and is everything you dreamed of. But soon you discover an ADU can only be half the size of the footprint of your home, the windows have a size limit, and you have no idea how to orient it to fit within the required setbacks. Reluctantly, you shelve the ADU. You’re not alone. An investigation of 74 residential parcels in a Salt Lake City neighborhood showed that 69 of those parcels—over 93 percent—have one or more hardships which severely affect the possibility of constructing a detached ADU. The size of the property, the size of the existing residence, and the access to the yards means that every lot needs a unique and custom ADU design.  Vested ADU provides the customizable system you need but without the added price tag of a custom design. Using Structural Insulated Panels in a variety of modular configurations, an ADU that fits your property and your budget is finally possible.

ADU Runner-up

Guerilla Urbanism - Yixuan Lin

On account of the high rents in Utah, Annex Garages are generated above garages in a community, those Annex Garage will be rent to young couples who working or seeking jobs in the Urbanism. The area of ​​the Annex Garage is 32 square meters（it is depended on the size of original garage, but the proportions are uniform, and the one of original garage is 24 square meters, 7 square meters of the excess 8 square meters are used as stairs. Moreover, a double-sized garage can build two houses. Therefore, housekeepers can get additional rent income, and couples who work in the city do not have to pay expensive rent.

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Tiny Home Grand Award

DAHLIN Concept - Dahlin Group Architecture Planning

MOD HIVE exemplifies flexible design by maximizing adaptability to a variety of sites and contexts to create cost efficient tiny home villages. By identifying an actual block of lots in Salt Lake City, we ensured appropriateness to real world local conditions. The resulting design responds to the existing character and context while paving the way for a future of increased housing diversity, supporting a more inclusive community. The name, MOD HIVE, captures this spirit: “mod” referring to the modular, modern design while “hive” is a nod to the beehive as a ubiquitous symbol for Utah and for the community and social connection our design supports.  Respecting the overall feel and rhythm of a single-family detached neighborhood with 2-story homes, the inward-looking site plan creates a tiny village with a community garden, outdoor gathering space, and BBQ/firepit to create a sense of place and community.  To respond to the existing charming traditional architecture in Utah, we chose a modern cottage architectural style featuring warm wood tones, clean lines, and dark windows to contrast with the siding materials. The steep roof pitches of the style allow for vaulted ceilings that help make these tiny homes feel larger than their square footage.

Tiny Home Runner-up

Plug and Play - ajc architects

Affordable housing is difficult to find within Salt Lake City’s existing neighborhoods. Current housing stock is expensive, underdeveloped in terms of density, and mostly inaccessible to those with common physical disabilities. Addressing these housing deficiencies will require new approaches and disrupt traditional ideas of housing and community. This specific approach looks not to peoples’ backyards and development within existing residential blocks, but to common commercial property typologies that can be found across the valley.  Large surface parking lots represent underutilized land that can be adapted to help address the ever-growing scarcity of developable land within existing communities. Big box stores, supermarkets, shopping malls and plazas are all commonly surrounded by seas of surface parking. Parking lots are often largely vacant and are problematic in terms of contributing to the urban fabric and culture of an area. By creating a strategy to activate and enliven some portion of these existing parking lots, a new mixed-use development pattern begins to take shape.  The Plug and Play strategy to occupy existing parking lots relies on implementation of infrastructure, incremental development based on a standard 8’-3”x 18’-0” parking space, and neighborhood building to create a new model for a new urbanist mixed-use development model.

Tiny Home Runner-up

House with a Corner EaveCho & Urano

This is a tiny house for a tiny site, perhaps an underutilized patch of earth somewhere on your block. With a footprint of only 17 by 19 feet it could fit in so many places. The parts are all made in a factory somewhere, which keeps costs low—waste too. They fit onto a standard flatbed trailer, and once they have been shipped to the site it is just a matter of assembly—bathroom and kitchen first, then the loft and skylight on top of that, then walls, roof, and so on …This house, tiny though it may be, has an inside that feels comfortable and varied despite its small footprint. There are four openings, each with a different size and orientation—a small window in the bathroom, a medium-sized window in the kitchen, a large skylight in the loft, and extra-large sliding glass doors at the corner eave of the roof. This glazed corner can be curtained off for private doings, while the spacious vertical interior, punctuated with a framed view to the heavens, provides plenty of natural light and much needed room for the mind.

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Honorable Mention

T-House - Jeremy Morgan

Unhoused people are constantly experiencing uncertainty and chaos in their lives. A more permanent  living situation could provide stability in the rest of their daily life through employment opportunities, better physical and mental health, and overall wellbeing. The design of T_House invokes a form of an A-frame that is typically seen in idyllic or calm environments of forests or mountains or on a lake. The intent is to take someone experiencing chaos and instability and bring calm and comfort to their lives through architectural form.