Space Craft Architect's award-winning mid-rise apartment design. Photo: supplied
One feature of Space Craft Architect's award-winning apartment design is "grumpy spaces."
The mid-rise apartment complex design from the New Zealand firm won a recent competition in Australia. It will go into a pattern collection of housing plans with the hopes of ending a chronic housing shortage with beautiful but functional designs.
"Grumpy space tends to be a private outdoor area so that you can get away from either people in your own house or people within adjoining houses, privately. Even if it is quite a small area," said Tim Gittos, an architect who co-founded Space Craft with his partner Caro Robertson. He recently spoke to Culture 101's Mark Amery.
"That is something that enables a happy functioning environment rather than squashing everything together."
Space Craft is behind some award-winning housing designs including the much celebrated Block Party co-housing development in Wellington. The firm is known for condensed housing which is also a joy to live in with shared and private outdoor spaces, and using building materials that are affordable and creative.
The mid-rise apartment design that will go into the pattern book to help remedy the housing crisis in New South Wales includes ground-level gardens, rooftop social areas, kitchen gardens and other shared social spaces as well as private verandahs.
The goal is to create a neighbourhood feel that residents can opt into while retreating to their private decks when they want to. New South Wales - like New Zealand - has a major housing shortage and needs 370,000 homes over five years.
Space Craft's apartment design is also a critique of the many new high-density housing developments going up in New Zealand's urban centres where each home has a tiny outdoor space and often the complexes don't include shared outdoor space.
Caro Robertson and Tim Gitto from Space Craft. Photo: Jay Van Dijk
"This is finding a place that is affordable but still a really beautiful, comfortable place to live," said Robertson of the pattern apartment design.
The design is reminiscent of housing developments in other parts of the world and from other millennia - think the Roman empire - where a garden or shared private space is surrounded by apartments. Private verandas are on the outside and kitchens often look onto the central shared space through smaller, more private windows.
Space Craft's award-winning mid-rise apartment complex design. Photo: supplied
A shared private space for a single housing development "refines you into a community that is a size that you can know and trust ..." Robertson said.
But it isn't meant to force people into communal living but to facilitate what can happen naturally.
"If you think of it like you don't make any kind of collective activity really difficult by how you put housing together. You allow it. You enable it but you don't mandate it," Gittos said.
The shared outdoor/indoor space used by the Block Party development. Photo: DAVID STRAIGHT
These are similar concepts that Robertson and Gittos included in Block Party, the development that won Space Craft the 2023 New Zealand Institute of Architects Multi-Unit Housing Award.
It all started with Gittos and Robertson's own housing needs when they pooled resources with another family to build two homes on a single lot in Wellington. Soon another group - this time it was four households - approached them with the ambitious idea of townhouses and shared indoor and outdoor spaces on a 600 square metre lot.
Robertson described the process as trying to "hack the planning rules to keep our friends in the city."
The Block Party development. Photo: DAVID STRAIGHT
The goal of the pattern book New South Wales is to create a resource for housing designs - that Space Craft's apartment block design will go into - which can be used again and again, cutting down on design costs.
The idea of a pattern book for housing design doesn't yet exist in New Zealand, which needs an additional 125,000 homes in the next five years to keep up with population growth.
Robertson would like to see one in the future to help deliver housing that is "predictable but results in very lovely outcomes."
Space Craft's award-winning mid-rise apartment complex design. Photo: supplied
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